Brussels: Grand-Place and the Lower Town

Look at the Town Hall now. That spire rising ninety-six metres above the square is the original structure, completed in fourteen fifty-five. It was old even in sixteen ninety-five. At the very top, a gilded statue of St. Michael — the patron of Brussels — has been standing watch since the seventeenth century. He stands on a devil he's in the process of vanquishing. On the day of the bombardment, the French artillerymen used his position to calibrate their shots, and then proceeded to destroy everything around him.

What happened next is remarkable. The guild merchants of Brussels — the bakers, brewers, tanners, tailors, wood workers, archers, haberdashers, and boat builders who had controlled the economic life of the city for centuries — decided to rebuild. Not just to repair, but to rebuild in stone, in the baroque style, grander and more permanent than what had stood before. They hired architects, pooled resources, negotiated contracts, and within three to four years had constructed the ring of ornate guild houses you see around you today. The facades are covered in gilded bas-reliefs, allegorical figures, and the symbolic emblems of each guild. The brewers' guild house, La Maison des Brasseurs, bears a relief of a horse. The bakers' guild, Le Roi d'Espagne, is topped with a bust of Charles II of Spain.

In eighteen fifty-two, Victor Hugo was living in Brussels in political exile — he'd fled France after Napoleon III's coup — and he wrote in a letter that Grand-Place was "the most beautiful square in the world." He was not alone in that judgment. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in nineteen ninety-eight. But the square was already functioning as a place of civic pride and tourism long before then. Every two years in August, the cobblestones — original eighteenth-century stones, uneven and worn — are covered in a carpet of two million begonias arranged in elaborate patterns, a tradition that began in nineteen seventy-one.

Look at the eastern side of the square, opposite the Town Hall. That long building is the Maison du Roi — the King's House — which confusingly was never a royal residence. It was the city's administrative and judicial building, known in Dutch as Broodhuis, the Bread House, because bread was sold here in the medieval market. The current neo-Gothic facade dates from the eighteen eighties, a Victorian-era reconstruction. Inside is the City Museum, which houses among other things the entire wardrobe of Manneken Pis — we'll visit him shortly.

This square has seen executions, markets, political speeches, and the coronation of Belgian kings. Egmont and Horne, the Flemish noblemen who resisted the Duke of Alba's Spanish tyranny in the sixteenth century, were beheaded here in fifteen sixty-eight. Their deaths helped spark the revolt that eventually led to Dutch independence. The flowers that appear at the base of the old buildings in summer are a quiet memorial to that long, complicated history. You are standing at the center of Brussels, and the center of several centuries of European history.

The gallery stretches for two hundred and thirteen metres in three connected sections. The Galerie du Roi — King's Gallery — where you entered. The Galerie de la Reine — Queen's Gallery — which continues through to the far end. And the shorter Galerie des Princes — Princes' Gallery — branching off to one side. King Leopold I, Belgium's first monarch, performed the opening ceremony himself. The occasion was treated as a statement of national modernity. Belgium was only seventeen years old as an independent country. It had industrialised faster than almost anywhere in Europe. The railways, the textile factories, the coal mines were all expanding. The Galeries represented something else: the idea that a modern city needed beautiful public interiors as well as productive ones.

Look up at that glass vault. In eighteen forty-seven, before electric lighting, this ceiling was the entire point. Natural light flooding into a commercial space was considered almost miraculous. The shops below — which sold luxury goods, books, cigars, and confectionery — were illuminated without the smell of gas lamps or the flicker of candles. The upper floors were apartments, accessed by staircases visible from the gallery. The whole structure was built on the site of a demolished urban block, which required the city to buy out existing tenants and reroute a street.

The eighteen forties were an extraordinary decade in Brussels. The city had attracted a community of political exiles and radical intellectuals who had fled various European governments. Karl Marx arrived in Brussels in eighteen forty-five after being expelled from France and lived here for three years, writing the Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels in eighteen forty-seven — the same year this gallery opened. Victor Hugo was here. The Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz visited. The revolutionary wave of eighteen forty-eight began while Marx was still in Brussels. He was eventually expelled by the Belgian government under pressure, just as the European revolutions were failing.

All of these men would have walked through this gallery. It was immediately the most fashionable address in Brussels. Today it still functions remarkably as Cluysenaar designed it — a public-private space that belongs to no one and everyone. The chocolatiers here are among the finest in Belgium: Neuhaus, which invented the praline in nineteen twelve, has been here for over a century. There are bookshops, a cinema, restaurants, and a theatre — the Théâtre Royal des Galeries — which has been staging performances since the gallery opened. The floor is marble. The ironwork is ornate. The proportions are generous.

As you walk through to the far end, notice how the gallery changes the experience of moving through the city. You entered from a busy street and are now in a protected, slightly timeless interior. This is what Cluysenaar intended: a space that was urban but not exposed, commercial but not harsh, modern but made of classical materials. The innovation was the glass, but the genius was the atmosphere.

There is something deliberately anti-monumental about Manneken Pis. Brussels is a city that could have chosen any number of heroic symbols — the medieval Town Hall, the conquering St. Michael, a great king or general. Instead, the most beloved symbol of the city is a small naked boy doing something completely ordinary and slightly rude. This is not an accident. It reflects something deep in the Belgian character: a suspicion of grandiosity, a preference for the human scale, a dry, self-deprecating humor that punctures pomposity.

The legends invented to explain the statue tell you even more. One story says a young boy saved the city by urinating on a burning fuse connected to a barrel of gunpowder left by an enemy. Another says he is the son of a duke who got lost and was found urinating in a garden. A third says he is peeing on the doorstep of a witch who had offended him. None of these stories are supported by any historical evidence. They are folk inventions, added layer by layer over the centuries, giving meaning to something that may have begun simply as a decorative fountain feature for a wealthy merchant's courtyard.

What is real is this: the statue has been stolen multiple times. It was taken by English soldiers in seventeen forty-five and returned. It was taken by French soldiers in seventeen forty-seven and also returned — King Louis XV sent it back with an elaborate ceremony and donated the first of the costumes. That began a tradition that has never stopped. Today Manneken Pis owns over one thousand official costumes, donated by governments, organizations, corporations, and fan clubs from across the world. He has been dressed as Elvis, as a European Commissioner, as a Belgian soldier of World War One, as a Scottish bagpiper, as a Chinese New Year dragon. The costumes are stored in the City Museum on Grand-Place. On special occasions — national holidays, the anniversaries of liberation, civic celebrations — he is dressed for the day and sometimes rigged to dispense beer or wine from his usual plumbing.

The surrounding street, Rue de l'Étuve, is lined with souvenir shops selling Manneken Pis in every conceivable form: chocolate, biscuit, bottle opener, keyring, waffle iron, garden ornament. The commercialisation is complete and slightly overwhelming. But stand for a moment and look past the souvenir shops at the small bronze figure himself. He has been here, in some form, for at least four hundred years. He has survived French bombardment, Dutch rule, the creation and near-dissolution of Belgium, two World Wars, and the twenty-first century tourist economy. He is still urinating with complete indifference to all of it. There is a philosophical position in that. Belgians call this attitude le sens de la dérision — the sense of derision, of not taking oneself too seriously. It is one of their most distinctive national traits, and Manneken Pis is its patron saint.

Look at the church facade and the windows above. The stained glass inside dates largely from the sixteenth century and represents the Habsburg connection: the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Philip II of Spain both had close ties to Brussels, which was then the administrative capital of the Spanish Netherlands. The window donated by Margaret of Austria and depicting scenes from her life is one of the finest pieces of Renaissance stained glass in Belgium. If the church is open — and it usually is — the interior is worth five minutes.

The square itself is elongated and slightly sloping, flanked by tall town houses that have been converted into antique shops, galleries, and some of Brussels' finest chocolate boutiques. Pierre Marcolini is here, whose chocolate is considered by many professionals to be the best in Belgium — which is a serious claim in a country where chocolate is treated as a matter of national honour. Wittamer, the pastry and chocolate house that has operated on the Sablon since nineteen ten, is at the lower end of the square. Both are expensive. Both are worth it.

The antiques trade has been centred on the Sablon for more than a century. On weekends, an antiques market fills the lower square beneath the church. The stalls sell everything from Art Nouveau jewellery to Flemish prints, from African colonial-era objects to mid-century Belgian ceramics. The quality varies enormously. The dealers are professionals and prices are not low, but the browsing is excellent and the setting — a Gothic church looming over market stalls on a cobbled square — is exactly what a European antiques market should look like.

At the lower end of the square is an eighteenth-century fountain donated by an English nobleman, Lord Bruce of Ailesbury, as a gift to the city in seventeen fifty-one. He had been received with particular warmth by the people of Brussels and wanted to leave something permanent. The fountain is modest — a basin with some cherubs and decorative stonework — but it is a reminder that Brussels has always attracted a certain class of well-heeled northern European exile who found the city civilised, inexpensive relative to London or Paris, and pleasantly cosmopolitan.

Immediately south of the Grand Sablon, separated by a small street, is the Petit Sablon — a small formal garden enclosed by a fence topped with forty-eight bronze statuettes, each representing a different medieval guild of Brussels. In the centre stands a monument to Egmont and Horne, the Flemish noblemen executed in Grand-Place in fifteen sixty-eight for opposing the Spanish Duke of Alba's repressive rule. The contrast between the prosperous, polished Sablon square and this memorial to political martyrs is very Brussels: commerce and history, beauty and tragedy, standing within a few metres of each other.

The buildings that ring the Mont des Arts form one of the densest concentrations of cultural institutions in any European city. On your left as you face the terrace is the Musical Instruments Museum — the MIM — housed in a magnificent Art Nouveau building called the Old England building, constructed in nineteen hundred as a department store. The building's facade, all ironwork, glass, and ornamental details, is as much an attraction as the collection inside. The museum contains over eight thousand instruments from across the world and from every historical period, with an audio guide that lets you hear each instrument as you stand before it.

Beyond it is the Royal Library of Belgium — the KBR — which holds among its collections the illuminated Flemish manuscripts of the fifteenth century, the greatest library of medieval Flemish painting in book form in existence. Next to that, the Belgian Film Archive, one of the oldest and most important in Europe, which has been collecting, preserving, and screening films since nineteen thirty-eight. Around the corner, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium — actually a complex of six interconnected museums, the most important of which is the Museum of Ancient Art, with its extraordinary collection of Flemish Primitives: Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, and above all the Bruegel Room, which contains the largest collection of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's paintings in the world.

And then, opened in twenty nine, the Magritte Museum — a dedicated museum to René Magritte, the Belgian Surrealist painter who lived and worked in Brussels for most of his life. Magritte's house was in the Jette neighbourhood to the northwest of the city centre, but his studio work, his notebooks, and the obsessive logic of his imagery — bowler hats, men with apples in front of their faces, pipes that are not pipes, the indefinite weight of clouds against perfect blue sky — are all on display here, in what is now one of the most visited museums in Belgium.

This concentration of institutions was not accidental. Belgium is a country that has consistently used cultural investment as a form of national argument — a way of asserting that a small, divided, linguistically complicated country can produce things of world significance. From the Flemish Primitive painters of the fifteenth century to Magritte's Surrealism, from the architectural experiments of Victor Horta to the jazz of Django Reinhardt, Belgium's cultural output is wildly disproportionate to its size.

The terraced garden itself is pleasant to walk through in any season, with fountains, benches, and a good view toward the Palais Royal and the park that stretches east toward the European Quarter. The clock in the garden, flanked by gilded allegorical figures, is a favourite meeting point for Bruxellois. It is also, on most days, full of pigeons.

St. Michael and St. Gudula are Brussels's co-patrons. Michael you know — the archangel, the dragon-slayer, the figure on the Town Hall spire. Gudula is less familiar outside Belgium. She was a seventh-century Flemish noblewoman who became a Christian mystic, famous for walking to early morning Mass in the dark and fending off the devil — who kept blowing out her lantern — with prayer alone. Her relics were brought to this church in nine seventy-eight, and she has been venerated here ever since. Her story is one of the founding myths of Brussels: an ordinary person, alone in the dark, persisting against opposition. Belgians appreciate a certain quiet stubbornness.

The interior is enormous. The nave is twenty-six metres high. Rows of thick clustered columns support pointed arches that carry the eye upward and forward in the manner that Gothic architects intended — a spatial theology, the idea that the body's experience of height and light could do spiritual work. But what you should make a point of seeing are the stained glass windows in the transepts. These date from the sixteenth century and are among the finest Renaissance stained glass windows in northern Europe.

The south transept window depicts the Emperor Charles V and his wife Isabella of Portugal kneeling in devotion. The north transept shows Philip II of Spain and his wife Mary of Hungary. These were not merely decorative — they were political statements, imperial signatures on the most important religious building in the Spanish Netherlands. Charles V was born in Ghent, just sixty kilometres away. He grew up speaking Flemish before he spoke Spanish or German. His connection to this part of the world was personal as well as dynastic, and the windows in this cathedral are part of that legacy.

The crypt below the cathedral, accessible for a small fee, contains the foundations of the earlier Romanesque church and some remarkable medieval stonework. It also houses a permanent exhibition on the history of the site, including the bones of several unidentified medieval individuals found during excavation. The cathedral is the site of Belgian royal ceremonies: coronations, weddings, state funerals. It is where the country marks its most important moments of national life, which is appropriate given that this building has been witnessing Brussels' history for nearly eight hundred years.

When you exit, notice the wide esplanade in front of the cathedral. It was cleared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to give the building a proper approach — before that, it was enclosed on all sides by urban fabric. The clearing created the view you see now. Brussels' urban planners have not always shown good judgment — we'll discuss some of their more destructive decisions shortly — but giving this facade room to breathe was the right call.

The Marolles became the Marolles partly because of what was done to the rest of Brussels. In the eighteen sixties and seventies, under the direction of the autocratic Mayor Jules Anspach, the centre of Brussels was comprehensively demolished and rebuilt. The river Senne, which ran through the lower town and which had become badly polluted and disease-ridden, was buried entirely underground. New boulevards were driven through the medieval street plan, modelled on Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris. The Rue de la Loi, the Boulevard du Midi, and other grand arteries were cut through existing neighbourhoods, displacing tens of thousands of residents — most of them working class, most of them from the oldest parts of the city. Many ended up in the Marolles, which was already dense and already poor.

The Jeu de Balle market has been running on this square every morning since eighteen seventy-three. It opens at six in the morning. The serious dealers and the best pickers arrive before dawn, with headlamps, to go through the new stock before the general public arrives. By eight o'clock it is crowded. By noon it is at its most festive. By two it is over, the stalls dismantled, the square returned to the pigeons and the neighbourhood kids. The goods for sale range widely: there is genuine Art Deco furniture, Flemish oil paintings of dubious attribution, communist-era memorabilia from Eastern Europe, African and Asian objects from Belgium's colonial past, boxes of vinyl records, trays of silver cutlery, and absolute mountains of ordinary household junk. The prices are negotiable. The sellers are a mix of professional antique dealers, casual weekend traders, and people who have simply cleared a house or a flat and brought everything to sell.

The church overlooking the square is Sint-Pieters-en-Pauluskerk — the Church of Saints Peter and Paul — a seventeenth-century building that has presided over the neighbourhood through all its transformations. It is used for regular worship and is the symbolic heart of the community. The streets immediately around the square retain something of the Marolles' traditional character: small bars, Moroccan and Turkish bakeries, secondhand shops, and a few remaining workshops. Gentrification has been advancing steadily for two decades — the proximity to the Sablon, just uphill, makes the Marolles increasingly attractive to young professionals and artists — but the square and its immediate streets still feel like the real city, not a museum of the real city.

This is an extraordinary process. In conventional brewing, a specific yeast strain is added to the wort, and fermentation is controlled carefully to produce a predictable result. Lambic brewing does the opposite: it invites contamination, embraces unpredictability, and produces a result that varies from batch to batch and year to year. The critical organism is Brettanomyces bruxellensis — a wild yeast that exists in this specific microclimate, in the wood of the old barrels stacked throughout the brewery, in the walls and floors of the building itself. It is part of what makes a Cantillon beer taste like a Cantillon beer.

After the coolship, the wort goes into wooden wine barrels — old port barrels, sherry barrels, Bordeaux barrels — where it ferments for one to three years. The result is young lambic, which is sour, flat, and wild-tasting, not a finished product. To make gueuze — pronounced something like "khooz" in Brussels dialect — the master brewer blends young lambic with older lambic, bottle-conditions the blend to create carbonation, and stores the bottles for another year or more. The result is a sour, effervescent, complex beer with a flavour profile that owes more to wine or cider than to conventional beer.

Cantillon produces roughly twelve hundred hectolitres per year. A large industrial brewery produces that in a few hours. This is one of the smallest scale commercial breweries in Europe. The family that has run it — currently the Van Roy family — has actively chosen not to expand, because expansion would require either pasteurisation, which would kill the wild character, or replication of the specific microbiological environment of the building, which is not really possible. The brewery is the terroir, in the wine sense: the taste is inseparable from the place.

The building is also a museum — the Musée Bruxellois de la Gueuze — and on most days you can take a self-guided tour through the coolship room, the barrel store, and the bottling area. The smell is extraordinary: a combination of fermenting grain, sour yeast, old wood, and something slightly funky and almost medicinal that is entirely unique. It is the smell of the Brettanomyces. It is the smell of Brussels, in a way. The tasting room at the end offers glasses of young lambic, gueuze, kriek (lambic refermented on cherries), and framboise (on raspberries). The kriek, made from the small, sour cherries of the Schaarbeek variety, has been produced by Cantillon since nineteen seventy-one. It is one of the most distinctive and irreplaceable drinks in the world.

But not quite everything disappeared. On the northwestern edge of the square, rising abruptly from a modern streetscape, is the Tour Noire — the Black Tower. It is a squat, heavy, circular stone tower, about fifteen metres high, its stonework dark with centuries of urban grime. This is a fragment of the second ring of Brussels' city walls, built in the thirteenth century. The walls enclosed a much larger city than the first medieval ring, and they stood until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when most of them were demolished for the same reasons of urban expansion that destroyed so much of old Brussels. The Tour Noire survived because it happened to be incorporated into a private building, which protected it until it was finally restored and displayed as the monument it is. It is the most visible remaining fragment of medieval Brussels' fortifications.

The church of Sainte-Catherine was completed in eighteen seventy-four to replace an earlier church that had stood on the site of the old harbour. The architect Joseph Poelaert — who also designed the vast and somewhat terrifying Palais de Justice on the hill to the south — produced a Baroque Revival building that has never quite been loved by Bruxellois, despite its grandeur. It is too big, too smooth, too recent. It lacks the patina of the genuinely medieval churches. But the bell tower from the original church, a delicate Gothic structure, was preserved and stands to the side of the new building, slightly out of scale with everything around it, a ghost of the earlier city.

The area around Sainte-Catherine is the fish restaurant district of Brussels. Dozens of seafood restaurants line the streets immediately surrounding the church and the square, particularly along the Quai aux Briques — the old canal quay — and the Quai aux Bois à Brûler. The connection between fish and this neighbourhood is ancient: when the harbour was working, fish was unloaded here and sold at the market. The restaurants are a continuation of that trade in a different form. This is where Bruxellois come to eat moules-frites — mussels in white wine with fries — the most emblematic dish of the Belgian capital. The mussels come from Zeeland, the Dutch coastal province just north of the border, where the cold North Sea produces some of the best mussels in the world.

If you are here in the evening, the square fills up with a particular kind of Brussels life — unhurried, convivial, loud enough without being overwhelming. The restaurants put tables outside when the weather permits, which in Brussels means any day when it is not actually raining. The Belgian relationship with outdoor dining is stoic and optimistic in equal measure. Order the mussels. They are cooked in a large pot with white wine, shallots, celery, and butter. They arrive at the table in the pot. You eat them with fries and a glass of cold Belgian blond ale. This is the correct ending to an afternoon in the city.

This is an unpromising origin for a national identity. And yet Belgium — this artificial creation, this compromise, this country that cannot agree on a national language and that has twice in living memory gone more than a year without a functioning federal government — has produced a cultural record that is entirely improbable given its size and age. Think about what has come from this small, flat, rainy, complicated territory.

The saxophone was invented in Brussels in the eighteen forties by Adolphe Sax, a Belgian instrument maker from Dinant. The instrument he created became the defining sound of jazz, one of the great musical forms of the twentieth century. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and physicist at the Catholic University of Leuven, proposed in nineteen twenty-seven that the universe had begun from a single point of extreme density and had been expanding ever since. He called it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom." Others called it the Big Bang. He was right. Audrey Hepburn was born in Brussels in nineteen twenty-nine, to a Belgian-Dutch mother and an English father, and grew up partly in occupied Brussels during the Second World War before becoming one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century cinema.

Hergé — Georges Remi — was born in Etterbeek, a Brussels municipality, in nineteen seven, and created Tintin: a boy reporter with a white dog who investigates crimes and conspiracies across a series of albums that sold over two hundred million copies and shaped the visual language of European comics. René Magritte spent most of his adult life in Brussels painting bowler hats and clouds and men with apples, producing images that have become the common currency of Western visual culture. Django Reinhardt, born in a Romani caravan in Liberchies, Belgium, in nineteen ten, lost the use of two fingers of his left hand in a caravan fire at eighteen and subsequently invented a new guitar technique that influenced every jazz guitarist who came after him.

Belgian chocolate. Belgian waffles. Belgian beer. These are not just food products — they are the result of centuries of accumulated craft knowledge, of guild traditions, of the particular combination of Flemish precision and Burgundian appetite that characterises this part of Europe. And then there is the European Union itself, whose headquarters, whose parliament, whose court of justice, whose commissioners and lobbyists and translators fill a quarter of modern Brussels. The European project — the attempt to prevent the continent from tearing itself apart again after two world wars — was conceived and implemented largely by Belgian and French Christian Democrats in the late nineteen forties and early fifties. The institutions are here, in this city, partly because Brussels was convenient and partly because Belgians asked for them.

You are back at Grand-Place now. The square looks the same as when you left it, which is to say magnificent. The guilds that rebuilt it after sixteen ninety-five could not have imagined that their four-year project of collective reconstruction would be standing three hundred and thirty years later, still functioning as a public square, still receiving the astonishment of visitors from every country on earth. They built better than they knew. That too is a very Belgian outcome: practical people, doing a practical job, producing something that turns out to be beautiful and permanent. The work is done. The beer is excellent. Find a table in one of the grand cafes on the square and order a Trappist ale. You have earned it.