Cross the IJ, ride north for a quarter of an hour, and the city is gone: green wooden houses, smokehouses, cows and water on every side. Waterland is the landscape people imagine when they think of Holland, and it is our home; our office is in Monnickendam.

Forty minutes from Amsterdam, a racing circuit winds through the dunes a few hundred metres from the North Sea. It was built after the war partly on roads laid by the occupying army, it has banked corners that would not look out of place in America, and on a weekday you can drive it.

On Sundays, a wooden tram from the early twentieth century rattles out of a national monument in Amsterdam-Zuid and through the Amsterdamse Bos. It is run entirely by volunteers, it is an official wedding venue, and you can hire it for your own group.

Behind Amsterdam Centraal a free ferry crosses the IJ to a shipyard where ships were built for almost a century. The cranes are still there. Inside one of the old halls hang more than 150 works by street artists, most of them made on the spot.