Refining sugar was an Amsterdam tradition long before the Wester opened. The city had been processing raw cane sugar - mostly from the Caribbean and, later, from Java - since the seventeenth century, with dozens of small steam-driven refineries scattered through the canal belt. When the founders of N.V. Wester Suiker-Raffinaderij signed their contract in March 1882, they were taking on an old craft at a new industrial scale. Initial capital was 800,000 guilders in thousand-guilder shares. The site, at Van Noordtkade 20 in what is now Amsterdam-West, was bought from the city. The first directors, L.E. Lowenstam and M.C.P. Barbe, planned a refinery that could process 25,000 tonnes of raw cane sugar a year. Within a generation, that figure had multiplied sixfold.

For its first decades the Wester ran on raw sugar from Java, ships unloading cane sugar at the Amsterdam quays and barges carrying it into the refinery. The plant produced about sixty different sugar products - granulated, lump, candy, syrups - and shipped most of them abroad. Then the Dutch sugar beet industry, which had started in 1858 in a single small factory, began to grow. Soon the Wester was refining beet sugar too, raw white blocks brought in from the southern Netherlands and worked into export-grade product on the Amsterdam waterfront. By 1907 the floor plan shows a refinery handling 150,000 tonnes a year, with rail spurs running through the buildings and a workforce in the high hundreds.

After 1900 the relationship between sugar refiners and beet farmers turned competitive. Some of the cooperative beet factories started refining their own product, cutting out the Wester entirely. In 1908 several of them merged into the Algemeene Suiker Maatschappij. The Wester responded in 1910 by changing its articles of association so it could produce raw beet sugar itself, issuing a million guilders in bonds to fund the move, and quietly buying majority shares in the Standaardbuiten and Lemelerveld sugar factories. By 1915 the company had a million guilders' worth of 'interests in raw sugar' - shareholdings it later admitted were in the Algemeene Suiker Maatschappij and the Gastelsche Beetwortelsuikerfabriek. In 1919 the consolidation went one step further: the Wester, the Hollandia dairy company, and the merchant partnership Van Loon, De Ram & Co. founded the Centrale Suiker Maatschappij - CSM - with 30 million guilders of share capital. By 1920, CSM was the fourth-largest company in the Netherlands.

Inside CSM, the Wester was always the difficult subsidiary. By 1935 it was the group's only sugar refinery, and it stayed dependent on export sales of refined sugar at a moment when Britain was protecting its own beet industry and global prices were sliding. The refinery profited briefly from postwar shortages in the late 1940s, then lost ground as soon as world sugar prices fell. The plant was outdated. Amsterdam wages were the highest in the country. In September 1960 the government stopped reimbursing the import tariff on raw cane sugar, and the case for keeping the Wester open collapsed. Two hundred workers were fired in 1962. In 1963 the refinery posted an operating loss of 5.6 million guilders. The final 250 workers were dismissed on 1 November 1965. Critics pointed out the contradiction: the same Dutch government that refused to subsidize the refinery had been spending up to 225 million guilders a year supporting the sugar beet farmers whose product the refinery would have processed.

The factory came down. Apartment buildings went up on the site. In 1994 the sculptor Jocke Overwater placed a monument on the square, a stylized version of the refinery gate, and the square itself was named Suikerplein. The Wester Harmonie, the company band founded by refinery workers on 4 June 1904, kept playing through everything and still exists. The brand name Wester continues on supermarket shelves as Wester Kristalsuiker, Westerstroop, and Wester Rietsuiker - sugar products that have nothing physically to do with the lost refinery but carry its name onto Dutch breakfast tables anyway. Amsterdam has been recycling old industrial buildings into apartments and creative space for forty years now, and the Wester is one of the cases where there was nothing left to convert. Only the name stuck.