Papendrecht

This page contains pictures and other items about the town I live in:

Papendrecht in the Netherlands.

Geographical position: 51° 50 N, 4° 41 E

Papendrecht and surrounding area

Papendrecht is a town of 31,000 inhabitants on the River Merwede. Just to the south of us on the opposite bank of the river Dordrecht is a fine medieval town, and to the north there's a rural area of great, typically Dutch beauty called Alblasserwaard. The famous Kinderdijk windmills (about 20 of them in a row) are about 6 miles north of us.

A lot of people in Papendrecht used to live in Rotterdam or Dordrecht ("Dordt" for short). Many of them work there, as well. The A15, one of the country's main motorways, runs just north of Papendrecht, but unfortunately we have no railway station.

You can get to Dordrecht quite easily, either by using the road bridge, or, when on foot or on your bike, you can use the modern catamaran "water bus", which is a ferry service plying the river between Dordrecht, Papendrecht and other towns in the area.

The A-15 motorway

This is one way of getting to us

Water Bus

And this is another, coming from Dordrecht

Van Maerlantstraat

I didn't take this myself, it's by Adrie Hello. Click on it to visit his site.

If you click here you'll find a site that shows Adrie Hello's Papendrecht pictures

Papendrecht has built a new town centre. Construction started in 2005. Since Papendrecht is a "dike village", meaning it used to be little more than a number of houses and churches along the river, it has no old town centre (even though Papendrecht is more than 900 years old!). The "old" town centre was a shopping precinct dating back to the 1960s. It was quite up to date in its day, but looked pretty shabby in the end...

While the new town centre was being built,most of the shops were relocated to a temporary precinct nearby. I took the two photos on the left during construction on 6 July 2005. The two other pictures show the present situation.

I took the pictures below on Wednesday 16 July 2003, which was a very hot day. The temperature was about 33C, which is really high by Dutch standards. I used Linda's digital camera. I went to a couple of my favourite places, some of which are really beautiful.
I added the entrance to the theatre, not for its outstanding beauty, but because it's such an important place to me. This theatre will now (summer-autumn 2009) be pulled down to make way for a new up-to-date building! We're all looking forward to working in this new, modern theatre... By clicking here you can go to my Picasa website where I'll be following the whole prcess of demolition and new construction.

Near my home

The heron that's gone

There was a heron here, but it flew just before I managed to take the picture

The Wind in the Willows

Veerdam

Music Stand

Theater De Willem

Probably the most fascinating and beautiful place in Papendrecht is its waterfront. A high dike runs along the River Merwede and to the north along the River Noord. Without this, we would be under 2.5 metres (more than 8 feet) of water.A walk along this dike provides a fine view of the oldest city in Holland, Dordrecht. On weekdays, you can enjoy watching all the shipping coming from or going to Rotterdam or Antwerp in Belgium. Upstream is the way to the German Ruhr with its cities and industrial areas. This river crossroads is the busiest in Europe. Even smaller sea-going vessels can be seen here.

River Merwede

Dordrecht (left), Zwijndrecht (right)