Travel Reference
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vigour, the elevator shoots upwards to the eleventh floor at a speed that makes your face feel as if it is
melting, pauses for a tantalizing half-second, drops ten feet, pauses again and then freefalls to the lobby.
You emerge, blood trickling from your ears, and walk with as much dignity as you can muster into the dining-
room.
So you can perhaps conceive my relief at finding now that the lift conveyed me to my destination
without incident apart from an unscheduled stop at the second floor and a brief, but not unpleasant, return
trip to the fourth.
Brussels, it must be said, is not the greatest of cities for venturing. After Paris, it was a relief just to
cross a street without feeling as if I had a bull's-eye painted on my butt, but once you've done a couple of
circuits of the Grand-Place and looked politely in the windows of one or two of the many thousands of shops
selling chocolates or lace (and they appear to sell nothing else in Brussels), you begin to find yourself
glancing at your watch and wondering if nine-forty-seven in the morning is too early to start drinking.
I settled instead for another circuit of the Grand-Place. It is fetching, no doubt about it. It is the
centrepiece of the city, a nicely proportioned cobbled square surrounded by grand and ornate buildings: the
truly monumental Htel de Ville and opposite it the only slightly less grand Maison du Roi (which despite its
name has never been a royal palace - don't say you never learned anything from me), all of them linked by
narrow, ornately decorated guild houses. The ground floors of these guild houses almost all contain dark,
cosy caf￩s, full of wooden furniture and crackling fires, where you can sit over a coffee or beer and gaze out
on this most beguiling of backdrops. Many people seem to spend whole days doing little else.
I opted for De Gulden Boot, even though on a previous visit I had been shamelessly short-changed
there by a waiter who mistook me for a common tourist just because I was wearing a Manneken-Pis
tracksuit, and I had to put on my severest Don't-fuck-with-me-Gaston look in order to get my full complement
of change. But I don't bear grudges, except against Richard Nixon, and didn't hesitate to go in there now.
Besides, it's the nicest caf￩ on the square and I believe that a little elegance with a cup of coffee is worth
paying for. But watch your change, ladies.
I spent two and a half days seeing the sights - the grand and splendid Mus￩e d'Art Ancien, the Mus￩e
d'Art Moderne, the two historical museums in the ponderously named Parc du Cinquantenaire (the
museums were a bit ponderous, too), the Mus￩e Horta, and even the gloomy and wholly forgotten Institut
des Sciences Naturelles - and in between times just shuffled around among the endless office complexes
in a pleasantly vacant state of mind.
Brussels is a seriously ugly place, full of wet litter, boulevards like freeways and muddy building sites. It
is a city of grey offices and faceless office workers, the briefcase capital of Europe. It has fewer parks than
any city I can think of, and almost no other features to commend it - no castle on a hill, no mountainous
cathedral, no street of singularly elegant shops, no backdrop of snowy peaks, no fairy-lighted seafront. It
doesn't even have a river. How can a city not at least have a river? They did once have some city walls, but
all that remains is a crumbly fragment stuck next door to a bowling alley on the Rue des Alexiens. The best
thing that can be said for Brussels is that it is only three hours from Paris. If I were in charge of the EEC, and
frankly you could do worse, my first move would be to transfer the capital to Dublin or Glasgow or possibly
Naples, where the jobs would be appreciated and where the people still have some pride in their city,
because in Brussels, alas, they simply haven't.
It would be hard to think of a place that has shown less regard for its heritage. Example: Brussels was
home for thirty-five years to the father of art nouveau architecture, Victor Horta, who was so celebrated in his
lifetime that they made him a baron - he was to Brussels what Mackintosh was to Glasgow and Gaudi to
Barcelona - but even so the sliggardly city authorities over the years allowed developers to demolish almost
all his finest buildings: the Anspach Department Store, the Maison du Peuple, the Brugmann Hospital, the
Roger house. Now there is remarkably little in Brussels worth looking at. You can walk for hours and not see
a single sight to lift the heart.
I am assured that things are getting better. It used to be that when you emerged from the central station
your first view was looking downhill across the roofs of the old town, and in the very centre of this potentially
arresting setting, in the sort of open space into which other cities would have inserted a golden cathedral or
baroque town hall, sat a parking lot and gas station. Now both of those have been torn down and some new
