Cycling Noord: discovering Amsterdam's creative other side

The ferry crossing

It takes four minutes. The free passenger ferry from behind Amsterdam Centraal crosses the IJ to Amsterdam Noord, and in those four minutes you can watch the postcard Amsterdam — the canal ring, the church spires, the dense 17th-century city — become a view from the water. Then you turn around and see Noord: flat, wide, post-industrial, with cranes in the distance and the A’DAM tower rising above the waterfront in a way that suggests a city still deciding what it wants to be.

I have taken this crossing perhaps a dozen times over successive visits. The first time was accidental: I got on the wrong ferry. What I found on the other side made me come back intentionally on every subsequent trip.

Amsterdam Noord is the part of Amsterdam that the tourist literature discovers every few years and declares “up and coming,” which it has been continuously since roughly 2010 without quite becoming the next thing in the way that was predicted. This is, I’ve come to think, because Noord doesn’t want to be the next thing. It’s not performing for visitors. The studios and restaurants and creative spaces that have settled in the former industrial buildings here are largely serving each other and the North Amsterdammers who already live there.

For a cyclist, this makes it excellent.

The route from the ferry

The ferry deposits you at the northern bank of the IJ, where the NDSM wharf starts and the A’DAM Lookout tower is visible to the right. The NDSM wharf is a former shipyard — one of the biggest in Amsterdam in the 20th century — now home to studios, event spaces, market halls, the largest flea market in the city (TodaysArt and the IJ-Hallen take place here), and a permanent population of creative businesses that ranges from film production companies to artisan food producers.

The cycling from the wharf is easy and pleasant. The cycle lanes in Noord are wide and well-maintained — this is the Netherlands, cycling infrastructure is not an afterthought — and the distances are navigable in ways that the denser centre isn’t. You’re not threading between trams and pedestrian groups; you’re on long, relatively straight paths through a landscape that feels genuinely spacious after the canal ring.

From the NDSM wharf heading east, the Buiksloterweg takes you past a long stretch of the Buiksloterkanaal — a canal that is entirely unrelated to the tourist circuit and has a completely different character: industrial on one bank, residential on the other, houseboats moored along the quiet stretches. In September, the afternoon light here is particularly good.

The STRAAT Museum

The STRAAT Museum opened in 2020 in a former ferry maintenance hall on the NDSM wharf. It’s dedicated to street art and urban art at a scale that no gallery with conventional proportions could accommodate: the works inside are monumental, painted directly onto the former industrial walls, with enough height and space for artists to create pieces that wouldn’t fit in any other venue in the city.

The collection includes work from international artists alongside Dutch and Amsterdam-specific urban art. The curatorial approach is serious without being academic — the wall texts are genuinely informative, explaining the cultural contexts that the works respond to. It’s one of the more interesting museums in Amsterdam and has the significant advantage of being nearly empty when the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh are at their peak summer capacity.

Getting to STRAAT without a bike requires the IJ ferry plus a walk or the separate NDSM ferry that runs on a less frequent schedule. With a bike, it’s 15 minutes from the main ferry crossing.

The A’DAM Lookout and Noord’s waterfront

The A’DAM tower is the former Shell headquarters, repurposed in 2016 as a creative hub with a 360-degree observation deck. The view from the top is the best panoramic view of Amsterdam that exists: you can see the canal ring in its full arc, the Vondelpark, the port to the west, and the flat Netherlands extending in every direction into a horizon that feels genuinely infinite.

There’s also a rooftop swing that extends over the edge of the building. I have not been on the rooftop swing and will not be going on the rooftop swing, but it exists.

The hidden gems and highlights guided bike tour includes Noord in some of its itineraries, which is one of the better ways to cover the NDSM wharf and the waterfront systematically if you’re not sure where to begin. The guide format works particularly well here because the context of what these industrial buildings were before and what they are now enriches the visit considerably.

The residential streets of Noord

Beyond the waterfront, Noord has a residential interior that most visitors never see because it requires leaving the NDSM area and cycling north. The streets around the Bloemenbuurt — a neighbourhood whose name means “flower neighbourhood” — are modest, early-20th-century housing with small front gardens and the particular quietness of a neighbourhood that was built for working people and has never attracted enough attention to gentrify fully.

There are good local cafés here of the non-designed variety: the kind where the coffee is fine, the prices are reasonable, and nobody is photographing the latte art. On a September afternoon I sat in one for an hour reading and was the only person there who looked like they had crossed the IJ to get there.

The amsterdam-noord guide covers the neighbourhood in more detail, including the best routes and the specific streets worth exploring on foot.

The bike tour option

If you want to explore Noord with structure and context, the Big Bike Tour Amsterdam covers both the city centre and Noord as part of a three-hour circuit, which gives you both the canal ring and the ferry crossing in one go. The time ratio tends to favour the centre, but the Noord section is long enough to give you a real sense of the neighbourhood.

The best bike tours Amsterdam guide covers all the guided options in detail, including the Noord-specific routes.

Getting back

The ferry back to Centraal runs frequently — every few minutes during daylight hours — and you can take your bike on it. The crossing gives you another four minutes to look at Amsterdam from the water, which I recommend using. The city looks different from the north bank than from the south, and the perspective of seeing the canal ring from outside, with the whole density of the centre visible at once, is the best way to understand its scale.

Noord is half a day well spent. It doesn’t replace the Rijksmuseum or the canal ring or the Jordaan food scene. But it is a different side of the same city, and cycling through it on a September afternoon — flat roads, wide skies, the smell of the IJ on the wind — is one of the experiences that makes Amsterdam more than the sum of its postcard images.

The cycling in Amsterdam guide has full route information for the Noord crossing, including the ferry schedules and the best onward route depending on how much time you have.