Narrow brick canal houses with stepped and bell shaped gables line a dead straight waterway, crossed by humpback bridges and quayside moored boats.
What Oude Delft looks like
The canal runs dead straight through the western half of Delft's historic centre, a brick quay on each side facing the water. Eleven bridges cross it, low humpback spans that lift a cyclist a half step over the canal and set them down on the other side. Boats sit moored along the quay for most of its length, close enough that their hulls break up the reflections of the houses behind them.
The houses lining the water are two to four storeys and brick fronted, with gables that shift from plain stepped profiles to rococo curves. A house at number 197 has a broad rococo gable added in the eighteenth century onto a building two centuries older. Number 77, on the corner of Poppesteeg, was rebuilt in 1898 with a corner tower and bands of natural stone across the front.
occupies a Gothic former monastery building set back from the water behind Sint Agathaplein, its brick wings arranged around a courtyard. The stands just off the canal, its 75 metre brick tower leaning about two metres out of true. Further down the water, the at number 167 has a sandstone facade covered in carved heraldic shields. The former at number 39, a pair of merchant houses joined into one front, stands lower down the same stretch.
The water sits at a different level against the quay in places along the canal's length. Trees run along the quay in a single row, their reflections doubling the houses in the water through the warmer months. At , where the canal meets the city's outer waterways at its northern end, the straight run gives way to a corner.
Shot in Oude Delft
Two films have used the Oude Delft itself rather than redressing it as somewhere else. The 1954 MGM film Betrayed staged a wartime arrest along the canal, and the 2024 Dutch Belgian Italian film Een schitterend gebrek worked the same stretch of water beside Museum Het Prinsenhof.
Betrayed, 1954
Colonel Deventer, played by Clark Gable, crosses the Oude Delft here before German soldiers enter from Peperstraat and arrest him. The additional shots made at this corner were filmed on 27 October 1953, the year before the film's release. Street View
Een schitterend gebrek, 2024
The stretch by Museum Het Prinsenhof
Een schitterend gebrek shot on the Oude Delft beside Museum Het Prinsenhof in 2024. The Dutch Belgian Italian film is based on Arthur Japin's novel of the same name. Street View
The Graslei and Korenlei line the Leie with stone and brick guild house facades that shift from stepped to bell shaped gables, much like the canal houses along the Oude Delft. The quay runs in the same straight, continuous stretch, so a single setup along the water reads the same way in both cities. Ghent's facades carry more carved stone trim and gilded ornament than Delft's plainer brick fronts, and the café terraces along the water need keeping out of a period frame. Try searching stone and brick guild houses now.
Bruges keeps the same brick and stone gabled architecture along its canals, built from the same Low Countries tradition as Delft's houses. The water in Bruges winds rather than running straight, but a single shot along a short quay stretch can still match the scale of the Oude Delft. Bruges' canals curve within a block or two, so a wide or aerial shot gives away the city's layout where Delft's dead straight run would not. Shots should keep to tight quay level framing. Try searching brick and stone gabled canal now.
Deichstraße in Hamburg, Germany
Deichstrasse backs onto the Nikolaifleet with merchant houses built across the 17th to 19th centuries, giving it a similar canal side scale to the Oude Delft, even though its own water is narrower and the street runs beside it rather than directly along the quay. The Speicherstadt warehouses visible in wider shots would give Hamburg away. Deichstrasse's houses also sit taller and closer together than Delft's, so framing has to stay tight on a single facade and the water's edge. Try searching merchant houses beside a canal now.
