Until Friday 23 March at 4pm CET, people can vote for the best ugly place in the province of North Holland (see link below). Even if you don’t understand Dutch, the 25 videos with all the candidates speak for themselves.
Watch and see places ranging from Beverwijk to Den Helder, Zandvoort to IJmuiden, and many more. There’s ugly stuff from the 1970s, 1980s and other decades that probably should never have been built or were poorly built and badly updated or are just plain weird and stick out.
All these urban planning gaffes are super obvious in a country that’s as flat as the Netherlands. And this was only done in one province!
(Link: nhnieuws.nl, image from nhnieuws’ Facebook page)
Free newspapers have been a successful part of the Dutch landscape for a while now, and sometimes a bit too much so. The railway stations and trains especially are littered with discarded copies. Sometimes that can be useful (if you do not have the time to grab a copy from an official dispenser), at other times finding a place to sit among a sea of paper can be a nuisance.