Laakhaven Is Changing. Here’s What It Still Is.
I moved my studio to Laakhaven three years ago because the rent was the only option that made sense on a freelance designer’s income. That was still true when I signed my current lease. I’m not sure it will still be true in two years.
This is what gentrification looks like in slow motion: not sudden displacement, but a steady shift in who can afford to arrive. The old industrial buildings along the canal are being converted. Some have been repurposed beautifully into genuine live-work spaces for artists and makers. Others are becoming something more generic, more expensive, more finished. The two processes are happening simultaneously and it’s hard to tell which will win.
What the neighbourhood actually is right now
Laakhaven sits west of Den Haag HS station, along the Laakhaven canal. Historically industrial — workshops, warehouses, small manufacturing. In the last fifteen years it’s been filling up with the kind of occupants who need cheap square metres and don’t mind rough edges: graphic designers, ceramicists, small print shops, music rehearsal spaces, a few restaurants that don’t look like restaurants from the outside.
The Laakhaven Hollands Spoor area is in active planning. The municipality has published proposals for 11,000 homes and a new city park in the broader area — a transformation that will take fifteen years but has already started reshaping who moves here and why.
Why it’s worth going now
The canal is genuinely beautiful, especially in the evenings. There are terrace bars that operate on the kind of informal, you-found-it energy that disappears once a neighbourhood makes it onto an official city guide. The creative community here knows each other — there’s a density of people doing interesting work in proximity that you don’t find in the more polished parts of the city.
If you want to see what this neighbourhood is before it finishes becoming something else: go now, walk along the canal, look for the buildings with bikes parked outside and no sign on the door. That’s where most of the good things are.
