Every design for Berkel En Rodenrijs

Berkel en Rodenrijs is known for the market gardens and glasshouses that grew on its reclaimed polders, a stone's throw from Rotterdam. Growers settled along the waterways, and a vegetable auction with its own harbour once stood by the station, taking produce in by boat and sending it on by train.

The land itself is the town's most unusual feature. For centuries peat was dug here and shipped off as fuel, until the pits merged into broad lakes that threatened the villages and dykes. In the eighteenth century windmills pumped the first of them dry, and steam pumping stations finished the job a few generations later, leaving neat rectangular fields in the older polders and more irregular ones where the lakes had been ragged. Today De Groenzoom and Park De Leeuwenkuil give that flat country room to breathe, and line E of RandstadRail runs along the track of the old Hofplein railway.

Step off at Rodenrijs, see the wide polder sky open up, and you know you are home.