Wherever
else you go in Belgium, allow time for Brussels, which is anything but the dull
centre of EU bureaucracy some would have you believe: in postwar years, the
city has become a thriving, cosmopolitan metropolis, with top-flight museums
and architecture, a superb restaurant scene and an energetic nightlife.
Moreover, most of the key attractions are crowded into a well-preserved late
seventeenth-century centre that is small enough to be absorbed over a few days,
its boundaries largely defined by a ring of boulevards – the “petit ring” or,
less colloquially, the “petite ceinture”. First-time visitors to Brussels are
often surprised by the raw vitality of the city centre. It isn’t neat and tidy,
and many of the old tenement houses are shabby, but there’s a buzz about the
place that’s hard to resist. The larger, westerly portion of the centre
comprises the Lower Town, fanning out from the marvellous Grand-Place, with its
exquisite guildhouses and town hall, while up above, on a ridge to the east,
lies the much smaller Upper Town, home to the finest art collection in the
country at the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts. Since the eleventh century, the
ruling elite has lived in the Upper Town – a state of affairs that still in
part remains, though in recent times this class division has been complicated
by discord between Belgium’s two main linguistic groups, the Walloons (the
French-speakers) and the Flemings (the Dutch- or Flemish-speakers). To add to
the communal stew, these two groups now share their city with many others,
including EU civil servants and immigrants from North and Central Africa,
Turkey and the Mediterranean. Brussels’ compact nature heightens the contrasts:
in five minutes you can walk from a chichi shopping mall into an African
bazaar, or from a depressed slum quarter to a resplendent square of antique
shops and exclusive cafés. This is something that increases the city’s allure,
not least by way of the sheer variety of affordable cafés and restaurants –
Brussels is a wonderful place to eat, its gastronomic reputation perhaps
exceeding that of Paris these days. It’s also a great place to drink, with bars
ranging from designer chic to rough-and-ready, plus everything in between.
2-The
Grand-Place
The obvious
place to begin any tour of Brussels is the Grand-Place, one of Europe’s most
beautiful squares, which sits at the centre of the Lower Town. Originally
marshland, the Grand-Place was drained in the twelfth century, and became a
market, cementing its role as the commercial hub of the emergent city when the
city’s guilds built their headquarters on the square. In the fifteenth century
it also assumed a civic and political function, with the construction of the
Hôtel de Ville. The ruling dukes visited the square to meet the people or show
off in tournaments, and it was here that official decrees and pronouncements
were proclaimed. During the religious wars of the sixteenth century, the
Grand-Place became as much a place of public execution as of trade, but
thereafter it resumed its former role as a marketplace. Of the square’s
medieval buildings, however, only parts of the Hôtel de Ville and one or two
guildhouses have survived, the consequence of an early example of the precepts
of total war, a 36-hour French artillery bombardment which pretty much razed
Brussels to the ground in 1695. After the French withdrew, the city’s guildsmen
dusted themselves down and speedily had their headquarters rebuilt, adopting
the distinctive and flamboyant Baroque style that characterizes the square
today – a set of slender, gilded facades swirling with exuberant,
self-publicizing carvings and sculptures. Each guildhouse has a name, usually
derived from one of the statues, symbols or architectural quirks decorating its
facade. Inevitably, such an outstanding attraction draws tourists and expats in
their droves, but there’s no better place to get a taste of Brussels’ past and
Eurocapital present.
3-The Lower
Town
Cramped and
populous, the Lower Town fans out from the Grand-Place in all directions,
bisected by one major north-south boulevard, variously named Adolphe Max,
Anspach and Lemonnier. Setting aside the boulevard – which was ploughed through
in the nineteenth century – the layout of the Lower Town remains essentially
medieval, a skein of narrow, cobbled lanes and alleys in which almost every
street is crimped by tall and angular town houses. There’s nothing neat and
tidy about any of this, and it’s this that gives Brussels its appeal –
dilapidated terraces stand next to prestigious mansions and the whole district
is dotted with superb buildings, everything from beautiful Baroque churches
through to Art Nouveau department stores. These days arguably the most
attractive part of the area is northwest of the Grand- Place, where the church
of Ste-Catherine stands on its own café-table-covered square, and not far away
place St-Géry is a secondary hub of activity. The streets immediately north of
the Grand-Place are of less immediate appeal, with dreary rue Neuve – a
pedestrianized main drag that’s home to the city’s mainstream shops and stores
– leading up to the clumping skyscrapers that surround the place Rogier and the
Gare du Nord – although relief is at hand in the precise Habsburg symmetries of
the place des Martyrs and the Art Nouveau Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée.
You’ll also want to take a stroll in the elegant Galeries St-Hubert, though
nearby rue des Bouchers is not the restaurant haven it cracks itself up to be.
To the south of the Grand-Place, almost everyone makes a beeline for the city’s
mascot, the Manneken Pis, but more enjoyable is the museum dedicated to
Belgium’s most celebrated chansonnier, Jacques Brel, and the lively,
increasingly gentrified but still resolutely working-class Marolles district.
4-Manneken
Pis
Walking
south from the Grand-Place, it’s the briefest of strolls to Brussels’
best-known tourist sight, the Manneken Pis, a diminutive statue of a pissing
urchin stuck high up in a shrine-like affair that’s protected from the crowds
by an iron fence. There are all sorts of folkloric tales about the origins of
the lad, from lost aristocratic children recovered when they were taking a pee
to peasant boys putting out dangerous fires and – least likely of the lot –
kids slashing on the city’s enemies from the trees and putting them to flight.
More reliably, it seems that Jerome Duquesnoy, who cast the original bronze
statue in the 1600s, intended the Manneken to embody the “irreverent spirit” of
the city; certainly, its popularity blossomed during the sombre,
priest-dominated years following the Thirty Years’ War. The statue may have
been Duquesnoy’s idea, or it may have replaced an earlier stone version of
ancient provenance, but whatever the truth it has certainly attracted the
attention of thieves, notably in 1817 when a French ex-convict swiped it before
breaking it into pieces. The thief and the smashed Manneken were apprehended,
the former publicly branded on the Grand-Place and sentenced to a life of
forced labour, while the fragments of the latter were used to create the mould
in which the present-day Manneken was cast. It’s long been the custom for
visiting VIPs to donate a costume, and the little chap is regularly kitted out
in different tackle – often military or folkloric gear, but occasionally
stetsons and chaps, golfers’ plus fours and Mickey Mouse outfits, which you can
see in the city’s historical museum. You can also see the Manneken’s equally
irreverent though rather more modern sister – Jeanneke Pis – squatting in a
niche opposite Delirium Café.
5-The Upper
Town
From the
heights of the Upper Town, the Francophile ruling class long kept a beady eye
on the proletarians down below. It was here they built their mansions and
palaces, and the wide avenues and grand architecture of this aristocratic
quarter – the bulk of which dates from the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries – have survived pretty much intact, lending a stately, dignified feel
that’s markedly different from the tatty confusion of the Lower Town. The Upper
Town begins at the foot of the sharp slope which runs north to south from one
end of the city centre to the other, its course marked – in general terms at
least – by a wide boulevard that’s variously named Berlaimont, L’Impératrice
and L’Empereur. Above here the rue Royale and rue de la Régence together make
up the Upper Town’s spine, on and around which is the outstanding Musées Royaux
des Beaux Arts, the pick of Belgium’s many fine art collections; the low-key
Palais Royal; and the entertaining Musée des Instruments de Musique (MIM). A
short walk south, rue de la Régence soon leads to the well-heeled Sablon
neighbourhood, whose antique shops and chic bars and cafés fan out from the
medieval church of Notre Dame du Sablon. Beyond this is the monstrous late
nineteenth-century Palais de Justice, traditionally one of the city’s most
disliked buildings.
6-Cathedral
of St Michael and Ste Gudule
It only
takes a couple of minutes to walk from the Grand-Place to the east end of rue
de la Montagne, where a short slope climbs up to the city’s cathedral, a
splendid Gothic edifice whose commanding position is only slightly compromised
by the modern office blocks either side. Begun in 1215, and three hundred years
in the making, the cathedral is dedicated jointly to the patron and patroness
of Brussels, respectively St Michael the Archangel and Ste Gudule, the latter a
vague seventh-century figure whose reputation was based on her gentle
determination: despite all sorts of shenanigans, the devil could never make her
think an uncharitable thought. The cathedral sports a striking, twin-towered,
white stone facade, with the central double doorway trimmed by fanciful tracery
as well as statues of the Apostles and – on the central column – the Three Wise
Men. The facade was erected in the fifteenth century in High Gothic style, but
the intensity of the decoration fades away inside with the cavernous
triple-aisled nave, completed a century before. Other parts of the interior
illustrate several phases of Gothic design, the chancel being the oldest part
of the church, built in stages between 1215 and 1280 in the Early Gothic style.
The interior is short on furnishings and fittings, reflecting the combined
efforts over the years of Protestants and the French Republican army, but the
massive oak pulpit survives, an extravagant chunk of frippery by the Antwerp
sculptor Hendrik Verbruggen, featuring Adam and Eve being chased from the
Garden of Eden, while up above the Virgin Mary and some helpful cherubs stamp
on the head of the serpent-dragon.
7-Musée
BELvue
The Hôtel
Bellevue, at the corner of place des Palais and rue Royale, was once part of
the palace, but has been turned into the Musée BELvue, which tracks through the
brief history of independent Belgium. It’s all very professionally done, with
the corridor displays concentrating on the country’s kings, and the rooms on
Belgium as a whole. Juicing up the displays is a wide range of original artefacts
– documents, letters, costumes and so forth, including the corduroy
mountaineering jacket that Albert I was wearing when he died in 1934. But it’s
the old photographs that really catch the eye: one particularly interesting
display focuses on those Flemish nationalists who collaborated with the Germans
during the World War II occupation; another is devoted to the protracted
conflict between the Catholics and the anticlericalists that convulsed the
country for much of the nineteenth century. It’s an appropriate location for
the museum too, as it was in this building that the rebellious Belgians fired
at the Dutch army, which was trying to reach the city centre across the Parc de
Bruxelles in 1830.
8-Coudenberg
Palace
Dating from the
1770s, the Hôtel Bellevue was built on top of the subterranean remains of the
Coudenberg Palace, which stretched right across to what is now place Royale. A
castle was first built on this site in the eleventh century and was enlarged on
several subsequent occasions, but it was badly damaged by fire in 1731 and the
site was cleared forty years later, leaving only the foundations. These have
recently been cleared of debris, revealing a labyrinth of tunnels that can only
be reached from the Musée BELvue. Visitors can wander round these foundations,
the most notable feature of which is the Magna Aula, or great hall, built by
Philip the Good in the 1450s. A small display of excavated items, including a
pair of helmets, does put some flesh on the historical bones and a map of the
layout of the palace is provided at Musée BELvue reception. You emerge on the
other side of the street at the so-called Hoogstraten House, which displays a
collection of objects found on the site, and then exit onto an alley next door to
the Musical Instruments Museum.
9-Place du
Petit Sablon
Just off the eastern side of busy rue Royale, the peaceful rectangle of place du Petit Sablon was laid out as a public garden in 1890 after previous use as a horse market. The wrought-iron fence surrounding the garden is decorated with 48 statuettes representing the medieval guilds; inside, near the top of the slope, are ten slightly larger statues honouring some of the country’s leading sixteenth-century figures. The ten are hardly household names in Belgium, never mind anywhere else, but one or two may ring a few bells – Mercator, the sixteenth-century geographer and cartographer responsible for the most common representation of the earth’s surface, and William the Silent, to all intents and purposes the founder of the Netherlands. Here also, on top of the fountain, are the figures of the counts Egmont and Hoorn, beheaded on the Grand-Place for their opposition to the Habsburgs in 1568
10-Notre
Dame du Sablon
The fifteenth-century
church of Notre Dame du Sablon began life as a chapel for the guild of archers
in 1304. Its fortunes were, however, transformed when a statue of Mary,
purportedly with healing powers, was brought here from Antwerp in 1348. The
chapel soon became a centre of pilgrimage, and a proper church – in High Gothic
style – was built to accommodate its visitors. The church endured some
inappropriate tinkering at the end of the nineteenth century, but remains a
handsome structure, the sandy hues of its exterior stonework enhanced by
slender buttresses and a forest of prickly pinnacles. The interior no longer
holds the statue of Mary – the Protestants chopped it up in 1565 – but two
carvings of a boat with its passengers and holy cargo recall its story, one located
in the nave, the other above the inside of the rue de la Régence door. The
woman in the boat is one Béatrice Sodkens, the pious creature whose visions
prompted her to procure the statue and bring it here. The occasion of its
arrival in Brussels is still celebrated annually in July by the Ommegang
historic-heritage procession from the Sablon to the Grand-Place.
11-Palais de
Justice
From place
du Grand Sablon, it’s a brief walk south to place Poelaert, named after the
architect who designed the immense Palais de Justice which anchors the end of
rue de la Régence, a monstrous Greco-Roman wedding cake of a building that
dwarfs the square and everything around it. It’s possible to wander into the
building’s sepulchral main hall, but it’s the size alone that impresses – not
that it pleased the several thousand townsfolk who were forcibly evicted so
that the place could be built. Poelaert became one of the most hated men in the
capital and, when he went insane and died in 1879, it was widely believed a
steekes (witch) from the Marolles had been sticking pins into an effigy of him.
12-Musée
Wiertz
There
couldn’t be a greater contrast to the squeaky-clean buildings of the EU
Parliament than the Musée Wiertz, a small museum devoted to the works of one of
the city’s most distinctive nineteenth-century artists, Antoine-Joseph Wiertz
(1806– 65). Though little known now, Wiertz was a popular painter in his day
(so much so that Thomas Hardy could write of “the staring and ghastly attitudes
of a Wiertz museum”), and this museum is housed in his former studio, built for
him by the Belgian state on the understanding that on his death he bequeath
both it and his oeuvre to the nation. Wiertz painted mainly religious and
mythological canvases, featuring gory hells and strapping nudes, as well as
fearsome scenes of human madness and suffering. There are a number of elegantly
painted quasi-erotic pieces featuring coy nudes, a colossal Triumph of Christ,
a small but especially gruesome Suicide – not for the squeamish – and macabre
works such as The Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head and Hunger, Folly,
Crime – in which a madwoman is pictured shortly after hacking off her child’s
leg and throwing it into the cooking pot. Mercifully, there is some relief,
with a few conventional portraits and various saucy girls in states of undress.
But whether Wiertz was really one of the greatest painters who ever lived – as
he believed – only time will tell.
13-Muséum
des Sciences Naturelles
Follow rue
Vautier up the hill from the Wiertz museum and you soon reach the Musée des
Sciences Naturelles, which holds the city’s natural history collection. It’s a
large, sprawling and somewhat disorientating museum, whose wide-ranging
displays are lodged in a mixture of late nineteenth-century and 1960s
galleries. There are sections devoted to crystals and rocks; rodents and
mammals; insects and crustaceans; a whale gallery featuring the enormous
remains of a blue whale; and, most impressive of the lot, a capacious dinosaur
gallery with a superb selection of dinosaur fossils discovered in the coal
mines of Hainaut in the late nineteenth century. The most striking are those of
a whole herd of iguanodons, whose skeletons are raised on two legs, though in
fact these herbivores may well have been four-legged. An excellent multilingual
text explains it all.
14-Parc
Léopold
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