A little walk around the neighborhood
That the new building of the Campus the Hague in the Wijnhaven is literally in the governmental heart of the Netherlands should not be a surprise. But who are our neighbors besides all the ministries and the municipality? Let’s take a little walk around the neighborhood.
First, let’s look up to the sky, to our upstairs neighbors. We have quite a few. At this very moment, a 164 apartments are built that take up the fifth to the 19th floor of the building. The apartment sizes vary from 70 to 143 square meters, of which most are meant for the rental market. Above these apartments there will be 6 royal penthouses that are no less than a 150 square meters in size. The lower side of the building – the side of Schedeldoekshaven- is not for residential purposes. The top floors of this side – 5 and 6- counts 2,100 square meters and are meant for offices.
Let’s go back to the ground, where there is room left next to the entrance of the University building for 5 more shops in the food or retail sector. How these spots will be filled up is at this point still unknown, although the rest of the shops in the area give some sort of impression of what we can expect. After all, the ‘Haagse Loper’, as the area between the Hague Central and the city center is often called, is home to many different well-known shopping formulas such as Etos, Albert Heijn and Action. There are, however, also a variety of lesser-known and hip lunch concepts such as Lebkov, August and Exki. Whether you feel like eating a healthy green salad at Exki or you are more in the mood for a culinary piece of pizza with goat’s cheese from August: no lunch break has to be the same again.
The neighborhood also accommodates us well for breakfast. Until 10 in the morning we can get a tasty breakfast at Bakker Bart for 2,75 euros, and if we are quick we can also get a coffee to go with it. After we have used up that fuel for some time-effective study hours, we may even want to visit the chiropractor across from the Wijnhaven building to make sure we do not get a back ache from all that studying. If after that we are still looking for a healthy and sporty walk, it takes us only 10 minutes to get to the beautiful green ‘Haagse Bos’, or, if we are more of the shopping kind, we can walk the other way and find ourselves in the commercial city center of the Hague in absolutely no time. Shopping, having delicious lunches or taking a break in the woods: our new neighborhood is definitely not short of places to spend our pastime.