Every design for Utrecht

Have you ever stepped off a train at Utrecht Centraal and felt half the country moving around you? The city sits in the very centre of the Dutch mainland, the knot where the nation's railways and roads meet, and it has been a crossing place since the Romans built a fort here beside the Rhine. They called it Traiectum, a place to get across the river; the U was added later to tell it apart from Maastricht.

Coming back here feels like returning to the middle of things. Utrecht received its city rights in 1122, signed the Union of Utrecht in 1579, and has been the religious centre of the Netherlands for centuries, yet it never feels like a museum. Students fill the cafés and the bike racks, the local dialect still calls the place Utreg, and the Rietveld-Schröderhuis and the Centraal Museum sit comfortably beside medieval churches. It is a city that wears its age lightly.

Picture the Domtoren above the rooftops, and below the street the old wharves and cellars along the medieval canals, where the city keeps one more storey than you can see from the bridge. That is the Utrecht you find on the map.