Industrial Heritage

In a green oasis along the Rupel River, a concrete elevated walkway rises, seemingly leading nowhere, yet it still holds quite a story.

The neo-Gothic station building of Binche today forms the impressive terminus of a railway line that once continued all the way to the border station of Erquelinnes.

In the early 1960s, a brutalist observatory rose from the ground on an expansive polder in Utrecht. From March 1964 onwards, students and astronomers could climb the so-called Star Tower to gaze at the sky.

Did industrialist Évence-Narcisse Coppée II restart his coke factory in 1915 to supply benzol to the German occupier? That question was at the heart of a lawsuit against Coppée in which his coke factory played the leading role.

When the Dutch king William I took the reins of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815, a merger of Belgium and the Netherlands, he began constructing canals.

From the 18th century onward, the French Vosges developed into a centre of the wool, linen, and cotton industries. Mountain streams powered watermills and provided the much-needed water for washing, dyeing, and bleaching fabrics.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, electric power experienced its breakthrough. During the Brussels World Exhibition of 1910 and the Ghent World Exhibition of 1913, electric lighting left visitors in awe. Electricity also played a starring role at the Universal Exhibition of Charleroi.

The clay pits of Terhagen in Belgium are part of a vast extraction area along the Rupel River, where clay was mined on an industrial scale throughout the 20th century for brickworks.

In northern Saarland, near the French border, these buildings transport you back to the Prussian mining era.

Along the Moselle lie the silent remnants of a railway bridge that was once of great strategic importance. The bridge was part of the dense railway network that, from the late 19th century, connected Germany’s industrial regions.