Street Art of NDSM in Amsterdam - Part 1 (7 photos)

NDSM is a weird name for a suburb or area or neighbourhood or whatever we call them, but that is becuase it stands for Nederlandsche Dok en Scheepsbouw Maatschappij or in English the netherlands dock and shipbuilding company which is a company that existed from 1946 to 1978 then merged with another company and struggled on until 9185 when it closed for good.

So what is this got to do with Amsterdam and and street art. Well the area of NDSM was the old shipbuilding yards north of Amsterdam and once abandoned in the 1980's it became a area for squatters, which of course are also often artists and then from the late 90's it was the place of gentirfication.

So what we have now is a mix of gleamy new apartment towers, and co-working spaces between old warehouses, art gallery and artist spaces and of course street art as far as the eyes can see (including a Street-art gallery which I'll cover in another post). But as you have already noted from the first three photos there are some amazing pieces on the walls of the old buildings.

Something like this scene is pretty much what it looks like, layers of pieces, from installations, stencils, paste ups and traditional tags, and of course some broken signs.

and every surface will be covered in colour.

and characters like a vampire devil priest with six eyes and horns.

And of course even in a place like this you can't avoid Banksy, even if it is disused advertising for a exhibition dumped behind a warehouse where no one, except this wandering tourist goes.