Book Review: The Invention of Amsterdam

Ben Coates must have used up a lot of shoe leather when he was out researching The Invention of Amsterdam: Europe’s greatest city in 10 walks.

Coates, who has lived in the Netherlands for more than a decade, criss-crosses the city from east to west and from north to south, taking in the sights, explaining each specific phase in the city’s history and writing about whatever crosses his path.

He joins a Keti Koti parade, smokes weed in a coffee shop, and revisits the site of the Bijlmermeer plane crash. He checks out the canalside mansion gardens on Open Garden Day and wonders where the tulips are.

He observes demonstrations and the Pride celebrations, and visits synagogues, churches, and museums in a vivid and relentless stream of observations, anecdotes and storytelling. The book is an almost exhausting read.

Nevertheless, Coates is a warm and witty guide, and it is easy to feel you are out walking with him, caught up in conversation. “Three men stumble past me looking very drunk,” he writes. “And I hear a mother tell her children, in Dutch, that ‘those men have been drinking special orange juice and now they’re very happy’.”