Every design for Zwolle

Beneath the Sassenpoort, the old gateway into Zwolle, the Hanseatic past feels close enough to touch. The city joined the Hanseatic League in 1294, fought in the League's war with Valdemar IV of Denmark, and was rewarded with its own trading post in Scania under the Treaty of Stralsund. Its golden age came in the fifteenth century, when its wealth multiplied several times over in under fifty years.

There is a quiet pride in belonging to a place like this. Zwolle stands on a gentle rise between four rivers, the IJssel, the Vecht, the Aa and the Zwarte Water, and its very name means hill, since that rise stayed dry when the floods came. The Grote of Sint Michaëlskerk still holds its carved pulpit and the Baroque organ by Arp Schnitger, and just outside town, on the Agnietenberg, Thomas à Kempis spent most of his life. Even the Bronze Age left its mark, in the woodhenge found in Zwolle-Zuid.

Ask anyone who grew up here and they will trace their childhood on the map: the Potgietersingel, the Ter Pelkwijkpark, the green of the Engelse Werk. It is all there, exactly where they left it.