The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
GETTING THERE
Our detailed online guide to Brussels, including hotel recommendations from our experts, is at telegraph.co.uk/ tt-brussels. Eurostar (eurostar.com) serves the city directly from London (two-hour journey time). store was built in 1899 to showcase the new style sweeping Europe at the time. Founded by a British businessman, the former department store is one of the best places to appreciate Brussels’ art nouveau heritage. Now a museum, the building houses one of the world’s finest collections of musical instruments. Brussels’ Musical Instrument Museum (mim. be/en) is open Tues-Sun, admission €10.
5 EDITH CAVELL
Cavell, a British nurse serving in Belgium during the First World War, became a heroine for saving countless lives of soldiers from both sides of the conflict. But when the Germans discovered that she had helped more than 200 Allied soldiers escape Belgium, Cavell was tried for treason. She was shot by firing squad at Schaerbeek on October 12 1915. Her grave is in her home town of Norwich, but her name can be found on a war memorial in Rue Colonel Bourg, Schaerbeek, Brussels.
6 AUDREY HEPBURN
Wandering Brussels’ artsy Ixelles quarter, look out for the gold plaque at No 48 Rue Keyenveld. This is where, on May 4 1929, Audrey Hepburn, British screen legend, below, was born. The Ixelles council is arranging for the statue of the actress that currently stands in Tolochenaz, Switzerland, where she died, to be moved to her birthplace.
7 AUDEN’S OLD MASTERS
Once you ha have seen the plaque to the Brontës at t the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, head u upstairs to the celebrated collection o of Flemish paintings. It was Pieter Bruegel’s Brueg Fall of Icarus that inspired WH Auden’s great poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”, which he wrote af after a visit to the museum in 193 1938: “About suffering they we were never wrong, the Old Ma Masters…”
8 HIPPIHIPPIES FOR BRITISH ROCK
It was the s swinging Sixties, but the RTBF (Belgium’s (Be francophone public broadcasting b agency) still broadcast broadca English music in translation, translat adapting it to traditional tradition French tastes. Furious at the lac lack of true British rock in Belgium, a group of hippies organised a protest on Brussels’ Place Flagey outside the RTBF’s headquarters. Touring French singers found themselves being pelted with tomatoes by Belgians. Belgium went on to play a more proactive role in the history British rock: the Moody Blues began to write Days of Future Passed here, and the RTBF ended up giving Genesis their first television appearance.
9 INK STAINS
The 16th-century Palais d’Egmont is now the home of Belgium’s Foreign Ministry. It was inside the palace’s marble halls that in 1972 British prime minister Edward Heath was sprayed in the face with printer’s ink when signing the treaty marking the UK’s entry into the EEC. The gardens of the palace are now a public park, a tranquil spot hidden between two of the city’s most bustling shopping streets. At the centre of the Egmont Park you can find the palace’s former orangerie, now a stylish café, and a statue of Peter Pan, a gift from the children of Britain to the children of Belgium.
10 CROQUET
In 1994, strolling along the lawns by the Château du Lac at Genval, it occurred to Englishman John Swabey that this lakeside spot would provide the ideal grounds for the beloved game he’d left behind in his home country. And so the Brussels Croquet Club de Genval – Belgium’s first croquet club – was born in Avenue du Lac. Twenty-four years on, Belgium now hosts its own annual national championships. Non-members are welcome to have a go – details are on the website (centrepeg. org).