Laundry & ironing service in Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel

Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel has existed as a village since around 1250. The oldest document in the national archives that mentions Nieuwerkerk dates from 22 January 1317 — when Count William III sold the manorial lordships of Capelle and Nieuwerkerk to Lord Jan van der Werve for 325 Holland pounds. The village lay, as the name says, on the Hollandse IJssel — a tidal river that brought ebb and flow deep inland.

Along that IJssel a remarkable industry developed: brickyards. Yellow IJssel bricks were baked here from the late Middle Ages onwards, in kilns of mud dredged from the river, fired with peat from the surrounding peatlands. Throughout Holland, and far beyond, houses were built with this yellow stone. The last brickyard in Nieuwerkerk stood on Klein-Hitland — owned for exactly 250 years by the Mijnlieff family — and only closed its doors in 1964 as the very last in the Netherlands. The print above, from 1881, shows the village along the IJssel in its centuries-old form.

Between the old dyke ribbon and the surrounding polders lay an unusual landscape for centuries: peat-cutting created large lakes, leaving Nieuwerkerk almost on an island. Only after large-scale drainage in the nineteenth century did it become one landscape again. The twentieth century brought industry, the twenty-first brought rapid housing growth: since 2010 Nieuwerkerk has belonged to the municipality of Zuidplas, together with Moordrecht, Moerkapelle and Zevenhuizen.

Living in Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel means seeing the old dyke ribbon, the IJssel and the new neighbourhoods all at once. The schedule is everyone's: busy. We drive set pickup days through the municipality — old village, Zuidplas, Esse Zoom, Park Hitland. Your bag is ready in the morning and comes back in the evening, clean and ironed, with the same driver. Same round, every week — in a village that has never quite stopped changing.