Another wave breaks in front of the old church as I hoik myself on to my board and surf towards the shore. It feels surreal to be surfing in a city, but if anywhere was going to pull off something as audacious as this urban wave pool it would be Rotterdam – a living laboratory for mad architecture.
“People come from all over Europe to do this,” says Tom Verhoeven, my instructor, as we wait for the next set of waves. “There’s nowhere else like it.” 

Verhoeven is just back from Australia, where he spent two years searching for the best breaks. While he was away, RiF010 opened in his homeland, offering perfect waves that can be cranked up with the turn of a dial. 

A sufer at RiF010 (Photo: Supplied)A sufer at RiF010. Residents have the opportunity to practice surfing within the city

I surf for a merry hour as the sun disappears behind the high-rises, then retire to a nearby bar where a DJ plays to a young crowd. Over a beer, I watch the off-duty instructors ride barrel waves. 

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Like the surfers, Rotterdam is riding a wave. The Dutch master of reinvention is at it again, forging a fresh identity as the old port deindustrialises. The city has form. Obliterated in the Second World War, it rose from the rubble to become the daring, decidedly un-Dutch modernist metropolis of today. Its skyline earned it the nickname “Manhattan on the Maas”, while its port grew to be one of the world’s largest.    

But with most maritime businesses having moved to the new out-of-town port, the city is reinventing itself again, finding new uses for the old docks. There are competing visions of what Rotterdam 3.0 should look like, but most agree on this: it must bring people closer to the water. 

Writer Gavin Haines post-surf (Photo: Supplied)Writer Gavin Haines post-surf. Rotterdam has become a ‘daring, decidedly un-Dutch modernist metropolis’

“Rotterdam was built with its back to the river [Maas] and we want to turn it around,” says Vera Bauman, senior programme manager for the municipality. “We’re starting to see that transformation.” 
Nowhere is it more evident than at Rijnhaven, an old harbour just south of the Maas. I walk there via the harp-shaped Erasmusbrug, as water taxis dart beneath me and a cruise ship docks. 

Rotterdam receives a fraction of the tourists that Amsterdam does (about 1.8 million compared with 9.5 million, with 12 times fewer Britons making the trip). You feel it on the streets, which are quieter, and it’s cheaper, too, with the cost of living estimated to be 14 per cent lower. That said, Rijnhaven is buzzing. Eking out the last rays of the day, swimmers jump into the harbour from a pontoon, while earthmovers sculpt a work-in-progress beach nearby.

“This is the first place in Rotterdam where people can get in the water,” says Albert van Eer, a landscape architect. “This was an important harbour, it’s where the port of Rotterdam properly began. Now it’s getting new importance.”

A floating hotel on Rijnhaven (Photo: Andre Muller/Getty Images)A floating hotel on Rijnhaven (Photo: Andre Muller/Getty)

Rijnhaven’s abandoned old buildings are also being reimagined. In February, a former coffee warehouse completed its transformation into the Nederlands Fotomuseum. Then there’s Fenix, an art museum about migration. 

“It’s not for us to tell people how to feel about migration,” says the museum’s PR manager, Esmee Köhler. “We just want to enrich the view that people have about it.”

Symbolism is everywhere in Fenix. The building itself, an old warehouse, belonged to the Holland America line, which in the 19th and 20th centuries shipped millions of European émigrés to the US, Einstein among them. 

The surrounding Katendrecht neighbourhood was home to continental Europe’s oldest Chinatown – and red-light district. Its plush new apartments and restaurants are symbolic of Rotterdam’s redevelopment, which has sparked cries of gentrification. 

The city is known as 'Manhattan on the Maas' (Photo: horstgerlach/Getty Images)Rotterdam is known as ‘Manhattan on the Maas’ (Photo: horstgerlach/Getty)

Keen to keep Rotterdam gritty is artist Joep van Lieshout, who once established an anarchistic free state in the old port. I meet him in Nieuw-Mathenesse, an area dominated by empty factories.

AVL-Ville, he tells me, had its own currency, constitution and weapons, including a Mercedes car retrofitted with a cannon – “because if you don’t have armaments nobody takes you seriously”. Part commune, part art experiment, it sprung up on an abandoned quay in 2001. It was no larger than a few football pitches and had a population of around two dozen. It had a farm, a clinic and “public transport” – a tractor and horse-drawn cart.

“We had a lot of problems with the king and prime minister,” Van Lieshout adds. “They don’t like you building a state within a state.” After nine months, police pulled the plug on AVL-Ville.  “They confiscated our weapons, which were just artworks; they couldn’t be used,” he says. The Mercedes is now in storage at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

But the micro-state’s renegade spirit lives on. Van Lieshout bought up some old factories which now host Brutus, a raw, 6,000 square metre exhibition space for maverick artists.

Next door to Brutus works another visionary, Dirk van Peijpe. His architecture firm De Urbanisten plans to transform a disused railway line into a park reminiscent of New York’s High Line. It’s designed so hedgehogs and other wildlife can navigate it. 

Van Peijpe’s flagship project, though, is the transformation of a dirty old harbour into a sandy, tree-filled tidal park. It’s a blueprint for a more biodiverse Rotterdam, with plans for an urban wetland. “This contact with the water is impossible in most parts of the city,” he says. “We need more of this – we need to invite nature into our cities.” 

Peijpe scoffs at RiF010 – “a concrete bowl full of water, very commercial” – and thinks Rijnhaven could be more generous to nature. But that’s Rotterdam, a city shaped by competing visions, messy and eccentric, and – like the river running through it – forever in flux.  

Getting there

Eurostar operates direct trains from London King’s Cross to Rotterdam.

Staying there

Hotel New York has river views and a bygone charm, with doubles from £130.

More information

rotterdam.info 
holland.com