A visit to Belgium

Brussels Town Hall

Mr Robot and I usually go on holiday to countries warmer than the UK, but a couple of years ago we went to Maastricht for his 50th, and it made us want to see more of the low countries in general – the Netherlands and Belgium in particular. Visit Wallonia started popping up in my Instagram feed and the region looked so lovely we decided to visit it. 

You'd think, being geographically relatively close, the area would be easy to get to, but it's not that simple. My local airport is Bristol, and Paris or Amsterdam would be the nearest destinations to anywhere in Belgium. Neither is really close, and both are very big airports, and I know from our trip to Maastricht that getting back to Amsterdam to catch a flight can be fraught. So we chose Eurostar. We'd never got the train to Europe before, and coming from the West Country adds an extra wrinkle as it means relying on the British rail network (ha! rely...) to get us into London when it's supposed to, so we broke the whole trip down into little chunks: an evening in London, Eurostar to Brussels, a night in Brussels, four nights in Namur (the capital of Wallonia), one more night in Brussels and then home from Brussels in a single day. Now we've done it, we know we could get much further in a day, but I think it was good to take smaller steps the first time.

London was London; we were only there for a night so stayed in the Premier Inn near St Pancras. As it was Mr Robot's birthday we had a cocktail in the very beautiful cocktail bar at the St Pancras Hotel – it's not cheap, but for where it is, and taking London beer prices into account, cheaper than you might imagine – and went for a curry.

The citadel of Namur, on the promotory where the rivers meet.

Eurostar trip was smooth, helped by the fact we had bags that would fit in the overhead rack. Our train ran slightly late, and I noted they held the train to Cologne so passengers going on to Germany could make their connection. Brussels was rainy. We've had good luck with our holidays for years, so we were due a rainy week somewhere, and this was it! Even so, even in the rain Brussels is absolutely captivating. Wikipedia says Grand Place/Grote Markt is one of the world's most beautiful squares, and that's no exaggeration. The medieval town hall and neo-gothic King's House (NB the king does not live there) plus numerous beautiful guildhalls restored in the 19th century are all different yet all in harmony with each other, and it's as though the guilds all competed to see who could build the most beautiful house. The drizzle meant it wasn't too busy. We revisited it at the end of our trip, on our one sunny evening, and it was heaving with people. And we passed through on our way to get the train home very early in the morning and it was empty, so if you ever want to see Brussels Grand Place/Grote Markt, get there at 8am to have it to yourself!

The belfry of Namur, from the 1300s, survived the destruction of the medieval wall.

I have mixed feelings about Namur, possibly not helped by the fact it rained almost the whole time we were there. Visit Wallonia certainly make it look very appealing, but it feels like a city that has not been shown much love for far too long. It's taken a pounding in wartime for centuries – Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, has beautiful countryside but it seems that every time there's been a war in Europe, whether it was the Spanish cracking down on Protestants, the French taking on the Spanish, Napoleon picking a fight with most of Europe simultaneously or Germany taking on the world, it seems to have rampaged across Wallonia. So Namur lacks the pretty medieval streets people think of when they think of Belgium. There's some really nice art deco near the train station that I wish I'd spent more time looking at, but on the whole its charm comes from being low-rise and on the confluence of a couple of rivers so having lovely riverbank space, not from its architecture. The area up to the train station is now being pedestrianised and they're putting in more street trees and planters and a garden area, so I think in years to come it will be greener and really pleasant to walk through. As an urban area, its greenness really us one of its strengths.

Look at all the lovely green space around the city!

The fortress on the hill overlooking the rivers' meeting point is interesting, having developed from the medieval period through to the 20th century (going up the hill with each new period), and there's a cable car up to it. That's one of the city's big attractions. We went there on our one day of good weather; as my back was up to its nonsense again we got the cable car to the top and then climbed down, going backwards in time through the fortifications.

If I could change one thing in the city, I'd replace this car park with green space, or at least an attractive pedestrian plaza.

The cathedral, on the other hand, is surrounded by a car park – right up to the doors! – and appears never to be open, unless it's for services. We'd hoped to visit it, but couldn't work out how to. It also looks uncared for on the outside. 

The municipal museum is built around the collection of 19th century antiquarians, like the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes, and so like that museum it's good for older stuff (in this case, to the end of the Roman period) and then feels a bit sparse for the next 1700 years. However, it's housed in an impressive new building and, like the improvements being made to the street, I can't help thinking it'll have changed massively, and for the better, within a few years. The same goes for the Museum of Decorative Arts, housed in a former aristocrat's mansion; there were signs up saying they'd completed essential renovation (roof etc) but the decor was a work in progress. They're not joking; the ceilings in some rooms had tape over the cracks! And yet where they'd been able to complete things, such as the kitchen, the rooms looked fantastic. All credit to the staff, who are clearly working hard and will make it beautiful one day. 

The kitchen at the Museum of Decorative Arts gives an idea of how good the whole place is going to look one day.

We did not make it to the Museum of Ancient Arts, because we didn't know it was there till we got back. Honestly, in Bath they'd be shoving that in your face till you were sick of it and visited it to shut the tourist board up. Kicking myself for missing that one.

The other big attraction of the city, though probably not one you'd take kids or your nan to (unless she's a particularly bawdy nan) is the Felicien Rops Museum. While Rops isn't as widely known as many of his contemporaries, as an artist he really was foundational to both the Decadent movement and Symbolism. Baudelaire was a big fan of his art. There was much more to his work than lewd etchings – early caricatures, some Impressionist-adjacent landscapes – but plenty of it is quite saucy. Saucy and blasphemous. The collection is impressively comprehensive, and Rops was really talented, and by the end I'd learned a lot but also felt a bit like I'd visited someone's hoard of smut. 

I adored the vintage chairs and tables in Le Chapitre – oh, and the beers. Mr Robot's picking one out...

All that might make it sound like I didn't enjoy the trip, but I did. The fact the place feels like it was unloved for so long makes me want to defend it, and clearly it's now being shown the care it deserves as the regional capital. Its greenness, especially close to the river, was really pleasant. Most of the buildings are low-rise, so it feels very human in scale. The cafés and restaurants we ate at were great, and we loved Le Chapitre, the little bar round the back of the cathedral. The people are really friendly, and appeared to forgive us our terrible French (they did keep offering to speak Dutch to us – maybe we look Dutch?). While I don't know if I'd recommend Namur for a holiday, it'd be a fantastic place to live, and I have no regrets about spending a few days there.