The narrowest house in the world is a bit of a fib

Here is the Amsterdam detail I keep laughing about. People come from all over to photograph the narrowest house in the world, a thread of a facade at Singel 7 that is barely a metre wide. It really does look impossible. The only problem is that it is not a house. It is the back of a perfectly ordinary one, and its actual front door, a sensible width, sits around the corner. The whole legend grew up around a rear wall.

If you want the genuinely narrowest house, you have to go and find a quiet little thing at Oude Hoogstraat 22, just over two metres across and five metres deep, which now holds what might be the smallest tea shop in the city. Both houses exist for the same reason. In the seventeenth century the city taxed you on how wide your frontage was along the canal, so anyone with sense built a thin, pinched front and then ran the house back and back and back behind it. The grand canal ring, all those elegant gables, is really centuries of people dodging tax with a straight face.

I painted the ring in watercolour and ink, the tall narrow houses leaning over their reflections. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  The Canal Ring, Amsterdam · Travel Poster