The Hague, one off
The rooftop farm in The Hague, and what became of it
Vegetables grown on water six floors up, fish in tanks below them, and a group in protective coats. What happened next is the interesting part.
One of the odder excursions we have run was with an Italian group to a farm on a roof. Not a few herb boxes: a twelve hundred square metre greenhouse on the sixth floor of a former Philips factory in The Hague, growing vegetables in water instead of soil, with tanks of tilapia downstairs whose waste fed the plants. It opened in 2016 as the largest rooftop farm in Europe, and standing in it in a protective coat felt like being shown the next century.
Why the group liked it
The Netherlands is the second largest agricultural exporter in the world by value, from a country you can drive across in three hours. Every visitor notices the greenhouses from the motorway without quite registering what they mean. A rooftop farm makes the argument in one room: no soil, no pesticides, no distance between where a tomato grows and where it is eaten. The group asked more questions there than at the Peace Palace.
What happened
It went bankrupt in 2018. Roughly two point seven million euro of investment, ambitious production targets, and a location forty minutes from the Westland, the vast greenhouse region that grows the same crops at a fraction of the cost. The building could not beat its own neighbours on price. The greenhouse stood empty afterwards.
We keep the story because it is honest about how this country works. The Dutch instinct to engineer a solution and try it at full scale is real, and so is the willingness to let it fail in public rather than quietly prop it up. Both halves are worth knowing before you look at a polder, a storm barrier or a reclaimed province and assume it all went to plan first time.
What to see in The Hague now
The city tour covers the ground that has not moved: the Binnenhof and the Hofvijver, the Peace Palace, the embassy quarter, the former Jewish district that is now the city’s Chinatown, Madurodam and the beach at Scheveningen. It works on foot in the centre or by coach if the Peace Palace and the beach are both on the list.
