It closed down in 1992 and was then repurposed to become 'Sugar City', an area with offices, retail shops and an event venue.

The Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland therefore decided to build a new steam pumping station for the sluices.

[3] In April 1862 many were relieved to hear of the plans to create a sugar factory in the Gemeenlandshuis Zwanenburg.

It happened to more or less meet the criteria for a sugar factory building: Sturdy enough and high enough to contain the required machinery and located on a navigable water.

It was on the crossroads of many inland waterways, and these were extremely important to economically transport the relatively heavy sugar beet.

[8] In January 1865 the public company "N.V. Beetwortelsuikerfabriek op den huize Zwanenburg" was founded to replace the Lans & Co, partnership.

One of the causes was that in the early years, the beet grown in the Haarlemmermeer polder contained much salt and were low in sugar.

[13] It led to an extraordinary shareholders meeting on 14 March, which agreed with the creditors, and then proposed to liquidate the company.

Mr. Adrianus van Rossum (1855-1917) from Amsterdam had bought the sugar factory in October 1881 for 81,600 guilders.

He first went to live in Halfweg, and then founded a public company "N.V. Suikerfabriek Holland" in Houtrijk and Polanen.

[19] By 1888, so many improvements had been made that the factory produced 19 tonnes of raw sugar per day.

While this short campaign did not fully utilize the higher capacity, it still had the advantage of extracting more sugar by limiting the storage time of the beet.

It ended on 16 December, after processing only 23,000 tonnes due to the factory contracting at low prices.

[42] As the production data shows, the ever increasing capacity of the factory led to ever shorter campaigns.

Of course, the idea was to contract for more sugar beet to utilize the extra capacity in a longer campaign.

The sugar factories then limited their competition by forming a cartel, the Bond van Suikerfabrikanten.

In 1899 the power of the private sugar factories was broken by the foundation of the cooperative Eerste Nederlandsche Coöperatieve Beetwortelsuikerfabriek in Sas van Gent.

[17] These developments finally led to a restructuring of the private beet sugar factories.

In 1908 the Suikerfabrieken van Breda en Bergen op Zoom merged with Sugar factory de Mark in Oudenbosch to form the Algemeene Suiker Maatschappij (ASMij).

[70] In late 1919 and early 1920 it seemed that Suikerfabriek Holland would be bought by a newly founded cooperative, which had been negotiating with the factory owners for some time.

[72] By mid February, the new cooperative led by Arie Colijn Mayor of Nieuwer-Amstel had placed 4,000 shares at 1,000 guilders.

[76] When the cooperative offered the price for the shares to Mr. van Rossum, the money was refused, stating that the company had been sold to the Centrale Suiker Maatschappij.

Retail shops no longer wanted to separately weigh each customer's order, and therefore asked for consumer size packaging of one or two pounds, instead of 50 kg bags.

All that Halfweg produced was sold on the world market for about a quarter of the sugar price in the European Union.

[87] In 2000 the shares of the B.V. Suikerfabriek Holland were sold to a real estate developer which changed the name of the company to Sugar City.

As former seat of the waterboard it has a different functional origin, but the connection with the sluices and the steam pumping station on the other side of the water give the complex an even higher ensemble value.

On the outside they are covered in sheet metal, and the windows have hundred of small LED lights that draw attention at night.

[90] In 1981 the television series De Fabriek [nl] was filmed on the terrains of the still active sugar factory.

Of course the employees would then lose their jobs, at the time it was a scenario that was very realistic for many people in Western Europe.

In 2015 part of the fourth season of the Dutch crime series Penoza [nl] was shot at the terrains.