Chapter 01 · Origins

The history of Hoofddorp.

Hoofddorp is barely older than a century and a half — and yet behind it lies a much longer story. A story about water, engineering and the audacity of turning an inland sea into fertile land.

Former name: Kruisdorp
Draining: 1849 – 1852
Founded: 1853
Polder: Haarlemmermeer

— 01

An inland sea called the Waterwolf

For centuries, where Hoofddorp now stands, there was no land, only water. The Haarlemmermeer was a vast inland sea between Amsterdam, Haarlem and Leiden, formed by the merging of smaller peat lakes whose shores had been eaten away by storm and peat extraction. In a westerly gale, waves crashed against the shoreline villages; in a southwesterly storm, dykes on the eastern side came under threat. The unruly body of water earned the nickname Waterwolf, because it literally devoured pieces of shore.

As early as the seventeenth century, the hydraulic engineer Jan Adriaensz. Leeghwater drafted a detailed plan to drain the lake using windmills. The technology of his day was not equal to it — hundreds of mills would have been needed — but the idea kept circulating. Only in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the steam engine, did draining become feasible.

The immediate trigger was a series of major storms. In November 1836 water was driven up to the gates of Amsterdam; in December of that same year, Leiden was flooded. King William I ordered the lake to be drained once and for all.

— 02

Three steam pumping stations and an empty lake

Between 1849 and 1852 the Haarlemmermeer was pumped dry by three of the most powerful steam engines in the world. Each carried a symbolic name: De Leeghwater on the north-west side, after the seventeenth-century pioneer who had first conceived the plan; De Cruquius on the southern shore, after the cartographer Nicolaas Kruik who had surveyed the lake with great precision in 1742; and De Lijnden near the modern village of the same name, after the chairman of the drainage commission.

The Cruquius was for a long time the largest steam engine in the world: a balanced system with eight pistons that together lifted some 65,000 litres of water per stroke. The three stations ran almost continuously. By 1 July 1852 the lake bed lay dry.

A polder that was drawn before it was built

What remained was a plain of fertile seabed, around 18,000 hectares in area and in places more than five metres below sea level. Before a single farm stood on it, the layout was already on paper. Surveyors traced a strict geometric pattern of canals and roads onto the bare bed. Anyone looking at a modern map can still see that design.

Land was sold publicly in 1853. Farmers from across the Netherlands — and from Flanders and Germany — bought plots and began the pioneer years. It was hard going at first: the soil was still salty, malaria appeared in wet summers, and only in the second half of the century did the polder come into its own.

— 03

From Kruisdorp to Hoofddorp

At the central crossing of the polder — where the Hoofdvaart canal met the Kruisvaart — a settlement began to rise from 1853 onwards. A tavern, a school, a church and a town hall followed in quick succession. Because the village stood at a crossing, it was known locally as Kruisdorp (“cross village”). In 1869 it was officially renamed Hoofddorp, after its role as the principal place of the polder and its position on the Hoofdvaart.

For a long time Hoofddorp remained an agricultural village, with flower bulbs, sugar beet and grain as its main produce. Well into the twentieth century, fewer than ten thousand people lived there. The post-war expansion of Schiphol Airport and of the wider Amsterdam region transformed everything: from the 1960s onwards, large-scale residential districts were built one after another — first Pax and Graan voor Visch, later Toolenburg, Overbos, Floriande and Vrijschot.

— 04

From village to town

The growth of the second half of the twentieth century was extraordinary. Between 1960 and 2000 the population grew sevenfold. What had been an agricultural village became a town expanded one district at a time, each carrying its own architectural language. At the same time, the old centre matured into a real urban heart, with a covered shopping centre, a library, a theatre and a town hall — facilities you would no longer expect in a village.

Today, with over eighty thousand inhabitants, Hoofddorp is by far the largest town in the municipality of Haarlemmermeer and the administrative and economic centre of the polder. But the origins are everywhere: in the dead-straight canals, in street and district names, and in the simple knowledge that everything standing here once lay on the bed of a lake.

The history of Hoofddorp.

An inland sea called the Waterwolf

Three steam pumping stations and an empty lake

A polder that was drawn before it was built

From Kruisdorp to Hoofddorp

From village to town

Next chapters

Attractions

Districts

Living