Scheveningen Beach

Scheveningen is the seaside district of The Hague, on the Dutch North Sea coast, reached from the city centre by tram in about twenty minutes. The beach runs several kilometres of pale sand behind a boulevard, with a pier standing out into the sea at its centre.

It has been a resort since 1818, when the first bathhouse opened, and the Kurhaus of 1885 still stands behind the sand as a hotel — a piece of nineteenth-century spa architecture in a country that has very few. The pier, rebuilt several times and now carrying a Ferris wheel and a bungee tower, is the landmark. The boulevard was rebuilt in the 2010s as a sea defence disguised as a promenade, which is a very Dutch solution and worth noticing: the wall you walk on is the flood barrier.

The sand is fine and pale, groomed, and wide. The North Sea is cold — around 18°C in August at best — shallow, and often grey. There is enough wind for kitesurfing on most days and a small but reliable surf scene; Scheveningen has more surf schools than the water strictly justifies. The northern end past the harbour is where the wind sports concentrate and the crowd thins; Kijkduin, the city's second beach a few kilometres south, is quieter still and backed by dunes rather than by a boulevard.

Development is a full seaside district: hotels, restaurants, a casino, beach pavilions that are built each spring and removed each autumn under municipal rules, and a working fishing harbour at one end. The Dutch beach pavilion is its own institution — a temporary restaurant on the sand, and there are dozens.

The beach is the flood defence. Everything visible here — the width of the sand, the dune behind it, the pavilions that are dismantled each autumn — exists inside a national system that keeps a third of the Netherlands dry, and the Sand Motor down the coast is the current experiment in doing it with less concrete.