The Louise Quarter
It is a neighbourhood that functions as a city within the city, with its own markets, its own restaurant streets, its own parks and its own rhythm, and it happens to be fifteen minutes from the Grand-Place by tram. Staying here is a different proposition from staying in the historic centre. Not better or worse, but genuinely different in character.
Here is what the quarter is, and what to do with it.
Avenue Louise — The Spine of the Quarter
Avenue Louise runs south from the city centre for nearly three kilometres, widening as it goes, lined with the kind of architecture that takes a while to register, large bourgeois townhouses, Art Nouveau façades embedded between more recent buildings, the occasional listed residence that has somehow survived every wave of development. At its upper end, it terminates at the edge of the Bois de la Cambre. Along the way, it passes through several distinct versions of itself.
The lower section, closest to the city centre, is where the luxury retail concentrates, the international names that appear on every major European shopping street. It is well-executed and well-maintained, and it is not the most interesting part of the avenue. The more interesting part begins once the avenue broadens and the side streets start to branch off toward the Châtelain and Flagey, where the neighbourhood reveals what it is actually like to live here.
Place du Châtelain — The Wednesday Market
Every Wednesday, the Place du Châtelain transforms. Market stalls fill the square from mid-morning through to the early evening, organic vegetables, cheese, bread, wine, prepared food, a handful of non-food stalls selling things you did not know you needed. By late afternoon, the stalls are still running and the restaurant terraces around them are already filling up. The market and the apéritif hour overlap in a way that makes Wednesday the best day of the week to be in this particular square.
The Châtelain has a reputation as an expat neighbourhood, which is accurate but incomplete. It is also where a significant number of Brussels professionals choose to live when they could live anywhere in the city. The restaurants and bars that have lasted here are the ones that earned it, La Quincaillerie in a former hardware store, the wine bars on Rue du Bailli, the coffee shops that have been refining their offer for the better part of a decade. It is a neighbourhood that has arrived at its character through use rather than design.
Rue Bailli, running north from the square, is worth taking slowly. Independent boutiques, a secondhand bookshop, a specialty food shop, the kind of street that is becoming rarer in European cities as independent retail gives way to chains. It has held on in the Châtelain, which says something about the neighbourhood.
Place Flagey — The Ponds and the Steamship
Ten minutes’ walk east of the Châtelain, Place Flagey occupies a different register entirely. The square is dominated by the Flagey building, a large Art Deco structure built in 1935 for the national radio broadcasting institute, now a concert hall for the Brussels Philharmonic. Its curved, ship-like profile has earned it the nickname “the steamship” among locals, and it is one of the more distinctive pieces of architecture in a city that is not short of them.
The ponds of Ixelles run alongside the square, two long, narrow stretches of water that follow the buried course of the Maelbeek river, flanked by paths and populated at all hours with runners, cyclists, people reading, people doing nothing in particular. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, a food market takes over the square itself: smaller and less curated than the Châtelain Wednesday market, but with a particular early-morning energy that belongs to weekends in residential Brussels.
The café terraces around Flagey are some of the better places to spend a slow afternoon in the city. Café Belga, which has occupied its corner of the square for long enough to become an institution, is reliably occupied from mid-morning through to late evening. The crowd is local, the beer list is serious, and the view of the Art Deco façade across the square is one of those things that Brussels offers without making much of it.
The Bois de la Cambre — Where the Avenue Ends
Avenue Louise terminates at the Bois de la Cambre, a large wooded park with a lake at its centre that marks the boundary between the city and the Forêt de Soignes beyond. In summer it fills with the full spectrum of Brussels life: families, students from the nearby universities, cyclists, swimmers crossing to the island in the middle of the lake, people who have set up for the afternoon and clearly intend to stay.
It is the kind of park that absorbs large numbers of people without feeling crowded, which is partly a function of its size and partly of the way it is laid out, wooded paths that disappear from one another quickly, clearings that feel private even when they are not. On a warm July evening, with the light coming through the trees at a low angle, it is one of the better places to be in Brussels.
The Abbaye de la Cambre sits at the park’s northern edge, a Cistercian abbey founded in 1201, with tiered gardens and a Gothic church that are open to visitors and almost always quiet. It is five minutes’ walk from the park and rarely appears on the itineraries of people who have not been to Ixelles before.
Getting Around the Quarter
The Louise quarter is walkable in a way that rewards not having a fixed plan. The distance from Made in Louise to the Châtelain market is five minutes. From the Châtelain to Flagey is ten. From Flagey to the Bois de la Cambre is another fifteen, along the ponds. The whole circuit, unhurried, takes an afternoon.
Trams connect the quarter to the rest of the city quickly, the city centre is four stops from Louise metro station, which sits at the foot of the avenue. For anyone arriving in Brussels without a fixed plan, the Louise quarter is a good place to find one.
For what is on in Brussels this month, the July events guide from Made in Louise is here.
