In a previous century, still in my late teens, I used to cross Amsterdam’s red light district on foot early in the morning on my way to a summer job. The atmosphere was relaxed and sometimes a sex worker, after a long night’s work, would proposition me in a broad Amsterdam twang, “Hey darling, how about a quick one before you’re off to work?”
Many an occupant of the red-lit windows back then was still natively Dutch, as were, I suspect, the punters who produced the puddles of vomit that were as present on the district’s cobblestones as they are nowadays. But in other respects, how times have changed. Most of the sex workers now appear to come from abroad, increasing the risk of human trafficking, and too many of the district’s visitors are rowdy tourists hell-bent on partying, many of them from the UK.
It’s the latter that Amsterdam’s city council has been targeting since the end of March in a new “stay away” video ad campaign that warns of fines, deportation and a criminal record for those looking only to raise hell in what is one of Europe’s premier party destinations. The clips are supposed to appear when you search online in the UK with terms such as Amsterdam stag party. Experts have already derided the idea, saying it’s as likely to attract as to repel.
It feels a bit unfair to blame British youth, and I’m not only addressing the boys here; from what I’ve seen, girls more than hold their own in this department, for acting out in Amsterdam.
There are the obvious attractions of the red light district and the readily available multifarious marijuana merchandise in the city’s famous coffeeshops. But on top of that, the country and the city have gone out of their way to attract mass tourism.
During the financial crisis, from 2008, Amsterdam city council launched a campaign to promote just that. Restrictions on cheap lodging, such as Airbnb, are minimal compared with some other major tourist destinations, and cheap flights are the hallmark of Schiphol airport. But most of all, the Dutch are famously lax at enforcement.
More police in the red light district would go some way towards mitigating the worst excesses. But when I talked to one of the mayor’s spokespersons for an earlier piece I did on drug tourism, he bluntly told me, “It’s not on the cards that we’d get more police officers. So, as far as enforcement is concerned, we can only increase that temporarily.” Which to me sounds like excellent advice to those seeking to come and party in Amsterdam: if you’re worried about getting arrested, just wait a few months until attention is focused elsewhere again.
The Dutch clearly want to have their (hash) cake and eat it, too. Income from tourism is still very welcome, and Schiphol’s outsize role for such a small country is also lucrative, but don’t pee in the canals or sing You’ll Never Walk Alone at the top of your voice at 4am in the city centre. Or as the mayor’s spokesperson said: “If you come here, enjoy our beautiful buildings, culture, history, everything we have to offer.” The other kind of tourist, who pukes in the street and passes out in porticos, “doesn’t do anything for us”.
A retired sex worker, perhaps surprisingly, came to a similar conclusion when I asked her about tourism. “With those hordes of tourists, it was very much looking and not buying.” Yet she also blamed the lack of enforcement for the situation getting out of hand. “It became less fun when they reduced enforcement.”
The city wants to change its image, but that sounds like a tall order, and I say that as someone who regularly used to fly from Birmingham to Amsterdam with the now defunct low-budget airline Flybe. More often than not, the partying and sometimes the puking started on the plane well before departure from Birmingham airport. Once a particularly rowdy and probably drunk reveller had to be removed from the flight before takeoff. Indignant with the injustice of it all, he shouted, “But we’re going to Amsterdam!”
With hindsight, I too was a small cog in Amsterdam’s huge tourism and travel machinery. My summer job, all those years ago, was to repair landing lights at Schiphol. But my ineptitude as an electrician makes it feel more like a small act of unwitting yet prescient sabotage.
