Delft Business and Trade Heritage Seminar-Walking Tour

Delft is one of the few European cities where seven centuries of commercial history are still legible in a single square kilometre. Within a thirty-minute walk, the visitor passes the medieval butter exchange, the fullers' canal, the working customs house with its 1647 weighing beam still in place, the Dutch East India Company's Delft chamber, a 14th-century brewing cellar revived in 2017, and the last of the city's thirty-two original Delftware factories — still hand-painting after 370 unbroken years. The Business History Seminar uses this geography as a living case study in commercial reinvention, drawing on the scholarship to ask the question every organisation eventually faces: when the industry that built you collapses, what do you reach for? Delft has answered this question, in different forms, four times.