Amsterdam’s canals are surrounded by creativity. Each street is inhabited by curators’ galleries, creative studios and artists’ working shops. The city’s artfulness is present also in its food. The pairing of chamomile & plum in a vegan Danish is nothing short of mind blowing. The Dutch youth are driven in all ways towards art and the artisan, engaging with and creating new flavours, music and visual styles.

The dominant supermarket chain Albert Heijn is comparable to M&S in quality but on a par with Tesco as a company. Albert sells a delightful chicken and vegetable pastry stick, it must be said. In bars and restaurants, fruity flavoured kombucha is regularly ordered by Amsterdammers as a soft drink in place of alcohol. As an ingredient, pistachio in pastries, coffee and chocolate is clearly having a moment across Europe.

Vegan popups are everywhere. Despite some post-pandemic closures, mainstream restaurants are expanding their plant-based options, and fully vegan venues remain popular with a rising number of applicants for vegan chef positions. This uptick in vegan vendors is resonant with Amsterdam’s artistic millennial youth culture. To varying extents, clean eating and fitness are contributing factors here — but the health angle may be undercut slightly by the availability of (incredible, unmatched) vegan junk food.

Perhaps the best of the vegan restaurants I visited is a Japanese shop, Men’ Impossible, offering a set taster menu of three starters, a main and a dessert. It begins with an assortment of three types of sushi, comprised largely of varieties of mushroom cooked in different sauces e.g. soy and ginger, or chilli. This is followed by a wholesome seaweed soup, an assortment of vegetable fritters, a main of ramen noodles and vegetables in garlic or chilli sauce, and a dessert of yuzu sorbet and vanilla ice cream. To be presented with five dishes and for each to be delicious and more importantly new to the tastebuds is, I suppose, the definition of a term at which I’ve often turned up my nose: a ‘food experience’. Or worse, a ‘journey’….

With the Netherlands ranking as the fifth happiest nation globally in 2025, Amsterdam is a much happier and more vibrant city than London, whose aura can be generally more cynical and dysfunctional. The Dutch can boast a happiness rate of 85 per cent and high scores on social support, trust, strong institutions and economic stability.

That happiness is manifest in the nation’s streets and establishments. Service staff are polite, accommodating and seem happy to be there. The UK, meanwhile, ranked 23rd — its lowest ranking ever — citing falling trust, life dissatisfaction and increased anxiety linked to domestic issues such as healthcare and living costs. One could leave Amsterdam having made friends. One is more likely to leave London, on the other hand, having made enemies.

Observable antisocial behaviour is minimal. Bike thefts are on the rise in the 2020s but the city feels safe in all aspects, safer than any British city I have spent time in and safer than many European ones at that. The concept of phone-snatching cyclists would be laughed at in Amsterdam. Tourists from English-speaking countries can be the most badly behaved people in the city and in particular exhibit poor etiquette in museums and galleries, talking loudly and standing directly in front of pieces. The man smoking a crack pipe outside Aldi, however, smiled at us; and the homeless man defecating by a canal appeared to clean up after himself. Even the city’s more distressing realities of addiction and homelessness are tempered by a degree of civility and social awareness attributable to the Dutch.

The city’s night life, its dance culture, is gently reigniting. Night clubs are collaborating with performance artists to host them on their dance floors, for example. But there is an active degree of separation from the tourism associated with ‘coffeeshops’ and smoking bars. Cannabis seems to have become synonymous with the culture that has been derided by locals, although a lot of them still smoke and frequent coffeeshops themselves.

While beating the drum of liberal causes such as identity politics and protesting international wars, the city itself has withdrawn from its more immediate past as a location for parties, hedonism and debauchery, becoming instead interested in the preservation of tradition against what is perceived as globalism — hence anti-tourism sentiment causing a domino effect in anti-cannabis sentiment. In that way, it is reflective of much of the rest of Europe in a general turn towards a new form of social conservatism and more specifically isolationism. 

Cannabis culture, though illegal, already exists in the UK. Having spent time in a healthy, robust nation which leverages that market as a legitimate contributor to GDP, it strikes me as absurd that Britain refuses to capitalise on what could be a multibillion pound industry. I see it as prudence bordering on naivety to assume legal cannabis would breed more antisocial behaviour than is already seen in our drunken, often disorderly public spaces.

The government could legalise a regulated, laboratory tested and approved portion of the cannabis market and leverage it by subsidising. It would no doubt see rapid and regular return on investment. The rest of the cannabis economy can be ‘tolerated’ or illegal in the same vain as the Netherlands, while British towns and cities benefit from regulated, higher-quality weed in profit-generating establishments employing thousands of people and improving high street footfall. 

Standing on the brink of bankruptcy and crying out about the need for growth but refusing to acknowledge a global multibillion dollar industry with demonstrably positive results in Europe and beyond is, at best, economically self-sabotaging. Bluntly, it is foolish.