The Hague’s Creative Scene Is Quieter Than It Looks. That’s the Point.
I’ve lived in three European cities as a graphic designer — Warsaw, Ghent, and now Den Haag. In each place the creative scene works differently. Warsaw is concentrated and legible: certain streets, certain districts, visible from the outside. Ghent has a strong institutional arts presence that gives the scene structure. Den Haag is different from both, and I’ve come to think the difference is a feature rather than a bug.
The creative community here is distributed. There’s no single arts quarter where all the galleries and studios cluster. The Mauritshuis and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag anchor the institutional side, but the working creative community — the designers, illustrators, filmmakers, makers of objects — is scattered across the city in whatever spaces they could afford when they arrived.
Where it actually is
Laakhaven has the highest concentration I’ve found — the industrial buildings along the canal have been housing creative studios for fifteen years, and there’s a critical mass of people doing genuinely good work there. But there are pockets elsewhere: around the old Stroom Den Haag building in the Rijswijkse route area, in a few of the converted spaces in Loosduinen, in the upper floors of buildings in the Statenkwartier that don’t announce themselves at street level.
The venues that give the scene its event infrastructure are Stroom Den Haag (contemporary art), West Den Haag (multidisciplinary, in the former American Embassy on Lange Voorhout), and KORZO (performing arts and new music). These three places between them probably account for most of the serious cultural programming in the city outside the major museums.
Why the quietness is an advantage
The creative scene here isn’t performing for an external audience. The people working in it are here because the rents were lower than Amsterdam, the city is liveable, and there’s enough of a community to sustain professional relationships. The work gets made without the pressure of being visible in the right way. For some of my colleagues that’s frustrating. For me it’s exactly what I came for.
If you want to find it: go to the openings at West Den Haag and Stroom, follow what’s happening at KORZO, and look for the studios without signs on the doors in Laakhaven on open studio days. The scene will show itself to anyone who’s paying attention.
