Editor-in-chief Nicole Ex

About the Nine Streets

photography: Daan Kamerman

Interview

No. 37 • March 2025

For our Spring issue, we embarked on a local exploration, inviting remarkable Amsterdammers to share the hidden gems of their neighbourhood. Our guide to the nine streets is Nicole Ex writer and founder and editor-in-chief of See All This art magazine, based at Herengracht in Amsterdam since January. Ex writes a personal column every week, which you can read via seeallthis.com/newsletter.

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photography: Daan Kamerman

Fig 1. Nicole Ex

photography: Daan Kamerman

What prejudice exists about your neighbourhood?

NE:

'Our editorial office is on the canal. Then you know: a place populated by those ‘grachtengordeltypes’. Can I prove anyone wrong? No, of course not. I'm a typical 'grachtengordeltype' myself, at least if that means that's someone who is infatuated with this unparalleled ground plan, someone who loves lime trees in spring and someone who can always be transported by the water in the canal reflecting the sky or the light streaming out of the houses. And then there is that light behind those windows themselves - that invitation that emanates from there and that forever wanting to come home safely behind such a window. And now at Herengracht 368, high at the top, behind two round and two toogram windows, just like that, the light of See All This is burning in one of the seventeenth-century Cromhout houses. We are above the Vrije Academie, with beautiful lecture halls for art history and philosophy, and a bar with an enclosed garden, where, among other things, sheets used to be bleached.'

What is typical of your neighbourhood?

NE:

'We moved here recently. We still need to explore the area better, but what strikes me is that there are still many shops and places that were there in my student days: Athenaeum Bookstore, vintage clothes shop Zipper, Café de Pels and that little bakery on the corner of Heisteeg, with syrup waffles the size of pancakes. Before we came here, we were five minutes away. A stone's throw away and yet everything feels different. It is the same experience as when you stand in your neighbour's house, or in the flat below or above you, that you think: how can this be the same building, the same street or the same neighbourhood? The difference with the Herengracht around Vijzelstraat is that there are a lot of offices, while here, off Leidsestraat, there is more living, plus the canal is criss-crossed by those tempting nine little streets, making it lively.
The residents of Amsterdam can be spoiled and pedantic - a nasty trait of city dwellers, not just Amsterdamers (when they couldn't even survive a day in the country) - but I feel they have become a bit nicer again in recent years. That may well be my rose-coloured glasses, because the move makes me think Amsterdam, with its 1,500 bridges, is the most beautiful city in the world again. Did you know that the water flowing through the canals was salty until 1872? It was connected to the Zuiderzee, you had ebb and flow all the way to the city centre. Amsterdam is indeed the Venice of the North. I once had the plan to paint the Golden Bend in that Venetian peach and ochre colour to see what our capital looked like then - it obviously never came to pass.'