Every year from March to the end of October, the Netherlands runs a national championship unlike any other on Earth. It is called the NK Tegelwippen, the national tile flipping championship, and the game is simple: lift a paving slab, plant something in its place, send in the photo, and your town's tally climbs. Municipalities compete in three divisions by size, chasing the Golden Shovel for the most tiles flipped per thousand residents and the Golden Tile for the most flipped outright. The idea came from a creative agency in 2021 and the country simply took to it: in 2024 alone, five and a half million paving slabs came up across the Netherlands, a national record, replaced by flowerbeds, facade gardens, herbs and small trees. The 2026 championship is in full swing now, running until the last day of October.
The joy of it is that every flipped tile does quiet, practical work. Soil drinks rain that paving once sent rushing into drains, streets run cooler in the warm months, bees and butterflies find flowers where there was grey, and hollyhocks climb house fronts out of gaps in the footpath, a sight the Dutch have loved for generations. None of it needs a big garden or a big budget: the smallest entry is a facade garden, one slab wide, along the bottom of a wall. It is climate care at the scale of a Saturday morning, done as a friendly contest between neighbours, and it would translate to any country with paving and a sense of humour. A slab, a trowel, a packet of seeds. Game on.
Questions you might have
What is a facade garden?
The smallest garden there is: lift the row of paving directly against your house wall, add soil, and plant climbers or flowers there. It greens a street without taking any footpath worth mentioning, and it is the beginner's event of the championship.
Does flipping a few tiles really help?
One tile, modestly. Millions of tiles, meaningfully. Unpaved ground soaks up downpours, cools streets in the warm months and feeds pollinators. The Dutch total so far runs to many millions of slabs, which is a lot of small gardens doing real work together.
Could we do this in Australia?
There is no official championship here yet, but nothing stops a household, a street or a council running its own tally. The recipe is public: lift, plant, count, celebrate. Spring is an ideal time to start.
Our short take: the championship is run by the makers of the NK Tegelwippen, begun by the creative agency Frank Lee in 2021, and has been reported by Positive News and by Euronews Green. The 2026 championship runs 19 March to 31 October.
