Amsterdam, drawn from its own streets.

Amsterdam on paper

The canals were dug as a set of arcs around the old harbour, and four centuries later they are still the structure of the city — so on paper Amsterdam is a series of curved water lines nesting one inside the other, cut across by radial streets and bridges at regular intervals. The Singel, the Herengracht, the Keizersgracht and the Prinsengracht print as parallel curves; the smaller canals within the Jordaan run at their own angle, straighter and closer together, and the difference between the two patterns is visible at a glance.

The IJ closes the top of the frame as open water, wide and flat, with the harbour docks and the island piers notching it, and the ferry piers along it where the streets stop. The Amstel comes in from the south and meets the rings at the bottom of the old city. Because so much of this print is water, it reads differently from a street print: the paper has real weight in it, and at any frame the water is what the eye follows first.

Outside the rings the city changes grain. De Pijp is a nineteenth-century grid of long narrow blocks, Oost and Noord are looser and more modern, and the Vondelpark cuts a long green wedge into the south-west. At seven kilometres across the print holds the rings, the IJ, the park and the districts immediately around them. Come in to a kilometre and a half and a single stretch of canal fills the sheet with every bridge and side street on it — the frame most people want if they lived on one of them.