The Stedelijk Museum Purmerend tells the story of this corner of North Holland from the drained polders of the seventeenth century through to the commuter boom of the late twentieth. The collection centres on the cheese and cattle trade that made the town: weighing equipment, market records, cheese moulds, and portraits of the kind of merchants who built the canal houses around the Kaasmarkt. It is a local history museum in the honest sense — not trying to be more than it is, but genuinely informative about why Purmerend exists where it does and why it looks the way it does.
The modern sections of the permanent collection deal with Purmerend's transformation from tight market town to expanded commuter suburb. The postwar decades doubled and then tripled the population, throwing up housing estates at a speed that Dutch urban planners would later look back on with mixed feelings. The museum does not flinch from this history, and the juxtaposition with the seventeenth-century material makes for a thought-provoking visit. Check the museum's website for current temporary exhibitions, which tend to focus on the broader Waterland and Beemster region and are often more engaging than the permanent collection.