Holtenbroek, Zwolle — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Holtenbroek?

Zwarte waterpark opened in 1983. It runs in two pieces, a strip east of the Zwarte Water along the district's western side and a plainer belt of natural woodland to the north that meets the green around the flats, and inside the western strip stands boerderij De Klooienberg, the one farm left when the polder was built over, now housing the neighbourhood farm and a toddler playgroup. Built in 1967, the Holtenbroekerbrug is a lift bridge whose deck stays horizontal while counterweights drop inside its towers, linking the Zwartewaterallee to the Blaloweg and the Katerdijk.

The Deltion College campus on the Mozartlaan was occupied at the start of 2009: twelve buildings, 110,200 square metres, a theatre seating over two hundred and a covered boulevard 500 metres long that joins all of them but one, the exception standing across the Zwartewaterallee. On the Palestrinalaan, the Louis Armstrong Flat turns up in the video for Verre Oosten by the Zwolle rap group Opgezwolle, whose member Sticks grew up here.

What is the history of Holtenbroek?

The ground was marsh before it was anything else, which is what the broek in the name records, and it was drained and diked later. Through the nineteenth century the city dung heap stood on the site, where organic waste from Zwolle was turned into manure and sold. On 17 September 1958 the housing minister Herman Witte drove the first pile.

Over fifty farms went; De Klooienberg stayed. The plan followed the functional-city doctrine, setting low-rise against high-rise at thirty to seventy with a few tower blocks on top, and the build target was four thousand four hundred dwellings for about fifteen thousand people. Zwolle joined the national Grotestedenbeleid in 1997, which released extra money for the district.

Between 2003 and 2016 two housing corporations took down about 450 dwellings in old portico flats and put up roughly 350 new ones, seventy per cent of them for sale; the split-level houses with a stair at the front that had earned Holtenbroek I the nickname Trapjeswijk proved too costly to renovate and were demolished whole, and the replacement finished in 2013 was named the Muziekwijk. The flats on the Bachlaan came down in the same programme.

Where is Holtenbroek?

Holtenbroek lies north of Zwolle's old centre on the east bank of the Zwarte Water, with Aa-landen beyond it to the north-east and Diezerpoort to the south-east, and it carries the city's statistical district number 30. Four numbered quarters make it up: Holtenbroek I in the south-west, Holtenbroek II in the north-west, Holtenbroek III in the north-east and Holtenbroek IV in the south-east. In 2011 the wijk held a little under ten thousand people in roughly five thousand households.

The Twistvlietbrug opened in 1999. Its 195 metres of concrete deck are shut to ordinary cars and carry bicycles and city buses west over the Zwarte Water to Stadshagen, while the Mastenbroekerbrug crosses further north and ties Stadshagen to Aa-landen and Holtenbroek together. Zwolle's central bridge-control room, a triangular red building beside the Twistvlietbrug, works the Mastenbroekerbrug and the Holtenbroekerbrug remotely as well.