bootstrap website templates

I ended up in Antwerp by accident. I had no idea what to do with my final day in Belgium. I knew I had to be in Brussels that night for the flight home. But apart from that? No plans. I picked Antwerp at random and even the guidebook didn't sell it that well.

I loved it. It's one of those places I became really fond of. It's a great little city. I hated it at first, right from the moment I set foot outside the station. I really hated it. The area around there is a shithole. The city centre is full of hipsters. Women with giant scarves and Macbooks. Men whose pants are too short on scooters. That kind of place. Chrome and glass coffee shops and millenials looking self-important.


Maybe it was the sunshine. Or maybe the beer and waffles. But I softened to it as I walked around and as the day went on, I loved the place. Antwerp is one of my favourite cities, now.

THE STATION

Byzantine temple to the worship of the train. I'm pretty sure some pretentious twat has said that at some point. If not, I'm claiming it for me.

The trains arrive in Antwerp in the bowels of the earth. You come up a series of escalators that make you think you are coming out of a coal mine. But you come out into the station. And it's a space like I have not seen since the Haghia Sophia. It really is that impressive. The whole place is a squat Byzantine temple done in full Art Deco decoration. It's breathtaking, you walk around goggle eyed, neck craned, looking upwards. The tourist shuffle, marking you out to pickpockets and purveyors of no good.

It leads out into a square, Konigin Astridplein. It's like one of those "then and now" photographs where half an old city-scape is superimposed with the a modern view of the same place. On the right, you're in the 1920's. Big Art Deco and Art Nouveau strip of buildings. On the left, shitty 1970's pig-ugly blocks.

Just to the right of the station, strangely, are a pair of gates that lead into the Antwerp Zoo. I only got as far as the ticket booth but it was something from another era. Hopefully, the animals aren't living in the 1920's but the park, at least as far as I got, was a lovely glimpse of a time past. Very evocative, easy to imagine yourself there. If I'd had more time then I might have gone further.

The Diamond District

Forget any romantic ideas. If you think you are going to woo some gullible broad by taking her shopping in the Diamond District, the best image that you are going to project is that you have an enviable sense of financial regularity.


It's a shit-hole. I'm not exaggerating it. There are a lot of rough-looking people there looking shady as fuck. The Diamond District seems to overlap a poor neighbourhood, if not entirely subsumed by it. The buildings are run-down, the streets are dirty, air is thick with diesel smoke. The place made me nervous and I constantly found myself checking my back and watching what people were doing. I was aware that I stood out by a mile in a noticeably poor district. Which is ironic, considering what goes on behind the very thick doors.


The jewellers' shops? Don't expect Cartier or Tiffany's. They are, for the most part, grotty little shop-fronts with glass windows that look about an inch thick. When you get off the main streets you get little glimpses of Jewish life and you start seeing that you are inside a world you never knew was there. Delis and bakeries. Travel agents offering flights to Israel and Eastern Europe. You are in these people's real lives. This is the interesting stuff. Back on the main road, you are just looking in the window of someone's office.


And I suppose that is the lesson. Sure, it's scruffy and unimpressive but this is life. This is how the people of this district make their living. I guess how these people had to make their living because no other paths were open. History shows that the Jews of any country could be expelled at a moment's notice, particularly the moment they are doing well. Living under that threat, you needed what you could carry in a hurry. What better than diamonds? Why would you invest in grand trading houses like the Flemish merchants did when at any time you could be told to leave?


Scruffy and grubby, the Diamond District makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Art in Antwerp

As you head into town from the Diamond District, you hit a statue of David Teniers. Teniers was a son of Antwerp and made his bones as a painter there. His work makes Antwerp look like it was Sodom in the 17th century. Teniers painted taverns and inns and the drunks and whores that inhabited them. I love these paintings, I love the honesty of them. Later in life he became a court painter, painting the great and good of northern Europe. But who gives a fuck? A portrait of Count van Pole-up-his-arse or some booze bag trying his luck with a hooker that should have retired a decade ago? OK, maybe you won't want the latter on your living room wall when the family comes around but I know which one I'd rather look at.


Only I couldn't. Because it's fucking Monday and everywhere in Europe of any interest is shut.


Antwerp's other art hero is Peter Paul Rubens. The inventor of Rubenesque art, women the world over can now tell you that they are Rubenesque after they have crushed the breath out of you. Thanks for your contribution.


Once I got out of the Diamond District and away from the scruffy and schizophrenic Konigin Astridplein, I started liking Antwerp. You get into the wide, pedestrianised streets. Fancy buildings and posh boutiques. It was pretty in the morning sunshine. It felt like the first day of spring and I half expected Max von Sydow to step out from behind a tree and explain how the world works to me.


Down a sidestreet is the Grand Cafe Horta. It's built from pieces salvaged from one of Horta's Art Deco buildings in Brussels and reassembled within a glass and concrete shell. It's an interesting building. Worth a look, even if just to leer at the middle class women taking morning tea. Down another sidestreet, the wonderfully named Wapper, is Rubenshuis. It's a grand 17th century palace. At least on the outside. It's Monday so it is shut and even if it wasn't, I'd have to buy a ticket and that is a step too far.

Sintjacobskerk/St James

Antwerp is a city of sidestreets. The whole place is a collection of sidestreets. Down another one is the big, grey-white Baroque lump of Sint Jacobskerk. It's an impressive building, seemingly carved entirely out of meringue. The outside is covered in scallop shells and dudes with walking sticks. For anyone in the know, it's a pilgrim church for those walking to Santiago de Compostela from northern Europe. And people really do. I met a couple in Spain that stepped out their front door in Amsterdam and just kept going. Three months on foot. Their route would have brought them past here. This semi-secret, arcane network of stopping points and safe-houses that you walk past every day without realising what they mean.

Rubens is buried here. I wouldn't know. What with it being Monday and everything on the fucking continent being shut.

Now I am starting to get uncomfortable. Coffee shops, skinny men cycling on fixies. I haven't seen a woman not wearing a giant scarf and sunglasses that cover half her face for about an hour. I am worried that the only beer I might see today was IPA.


Settle down, Antwerp had its little moment of showing its arse to me and then everything was good. I don't know if I had strayed into some sort of gentrification district or if it is a Belgian tradition that at 11 o'clock hipsters have to go outside and look concerned about how important their lives are whilst holding a coffee cup and a fucking iPad. Either way, I turned a corner and it was all good.

The Cathedral

You get a sense of mediaeval Antwerp around the cathedral. In true, industrious Flemish style, all that unused wall space around it is taken up with shops and bars built into the side of the cathedral. It's all higgledy-piggledy until it spews you out on to the main plaza.

The cathedral contains works of art by the Flemish masters. Again, shut. Not because it is Monday, this time they were actually having a mass and idiots like me were not wanted there. Fine, saved me a ticket.

The square is really pleasant. The cobbles sweep over a giant statue of a little boy and his dog, lying down, asleep. I guess it is supposed to be a blanket covering him. It's nice. Cute and innocent. Sometimes I long for the days when I could lie down with no thought in my head other than my dog. Who am I kidding? I never had a dog and the horizontal pleasures available to me as an adult beat the hell out of anything else. Whatever, it's a nice bit of street art that highlights how much of an idiot I have become.

There is also a well there with a piece of ironwork on it that illustrates the founding myth of Antwerp. A Roman legionary by the name of Brabo got into a fight with a giant, severed his hand and threw it into the Scheldt. From that, Antwerp got its name (from "hand-werpen", meaning to throw a hand). It is interesting to note that neither giants nor Romans survived here.

Elfde Gebod

The Eleventh Commandment is a cosy little bar just opposite the cathedral. Big wood burner and a beer menu. The walls are covered in religious art and architectural salvage, often in not the most pious of arrangements. This is the perfect place for a beer on a cold afternoon. I sat at a table, the only customer, feeling like a hardcore boozer. Monday, when all decent, church-going folks should be at work. With all the angels and saints and icons looking down, you get a real feeling of satisfaction when you order another beer.

Sint Carolus-Boromeuskerk

A big grey meringue of a Baroque church on the outside. Inside, it's white walls stand out. There had been 39 Rubens paintings in there,lost in a fire. Now, you get my favourite dismembered saints parade that I know and love so well, looking like ghostly DIY deaths frozen in time.

The Castle

Antwerp is another city, like Ghent, with an incongruous castle right in the middle of it. Right on the River Scheldt, it's a little, mean fortress. It looks like tough bastards occupied it. Squat and pointy, a place you won't mess with if you come up the river with stupid ideas of invading.

They used to throw Anabaptists in the river, sewn inside a sack. Until it got too pricey throwing away all those perfectly good sacks. Instead, they used to drown them in the castle and there was, allegedly, a special wooden tub kept for the job. It never ceases to amaze me just how shit the Reformation was. It is seen as some great period in European history yet it represents maybe one of the worst eras to have been alive in. Your existence was so fragile, you were so powerless in the face of forces you had no control over and no ability to fight. At any moment in time, someone could knock on your door and you'd find yourself being tortured to death in a public square. And for nothing.

Just above the main gate is a little figure carved into a stone at the apex of the arch. The stone is old, older than the castle, and the little man is an ancient fertility symbol. Another dangerous idea, so they chiselled his little stone dick off.

The castle today is a visitor centre. Just outside, under the cover of old sheds where the docks had been, is the Maritime Museum. The river bank is nice for a walk. Cities without rivers are weird places. Only a moron builds a city where there is no water. The Scheldt is a big, wide, lazy thing meandering its way to the North Sea. The other bank looks a million miles away. There are no bridges and it's all sand banks and marshes. Centuries ago it would have been where you went to commit dark deeds. Whoring. Smuggling. Everything you couldn't do under the noses of a psychotic church.


Further down the river is a big, white Art Deco lump. It looks like a liner has ploughed into the bank. It's a fancy bar and restaurant, now. It is even more out of place than the castle.


Grotemarkt

This is the postcard heart of Antwerp. No-one in their right mind is going to put the Diamond District on anything they want to sell to tourists. This is chocolate box central.

One side is lined with the old guild halls. Each trade in the city had its own but these were no social clubs for fish sellers and knife sharpeners. You didn't get buildings like these without serious money. Being a member of the right guild put you in with the city's great and good. These were the Trump Towers of the middle ages. The guilds began more like a union but eventually the turned into houses for people with fuck-you money to schmooze with other people with fuck-you money. They had the power to start revolutions, as happened in Ghent.

I sat on a bench here for a long time. The sky was blue and the sun was warm, even for February. The snow of the last couple of days seemed a lifetime away. I forgot it was winter. It was nice. The older I get, the less uncomfortable I am with being a tourist. For a moment, I considered ordering a plate of overpriced moules et frites from one of the cafes that lined the other side of the square.

I wandered round Antwerp for the rest of the afternoon and I honestly came to love the place. I had expected to dislike it, the guidebook made it sound like a filthy den of crime. To be fair, the Diamond District is a shit-hole and the streets around the station aren't the nicest. But once you put that behind you, and overlook the epidemic of hipsters, Antwerp is lovely.


I don't just mean its appearance. Sure, it is nice to look at but it's just a lovely place to be. Everyone looks happy. It's a place I grew fond of.