Ghent

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Gravensteen 1,500 points

  A grey fortress sitting in the middle of a shopping street with water still round it. Take the wall walk. From up there the whole tub of an Old Town is laid out below you and you can see exactly how little of it there is. One way in, water round the rest, and the shops starting where the water stops. Nothing about that arrangement is normal.

• Belfort 500 points

  Climb it. On the way up you pass the bell chamber, and the bells in there are not small. Stand under them when they go and you feel it through the floor more than through the ears. The balcony at the top is the only place on this level where the whole walk makes sense at once.

• Dulle Griet 500 points

  It lies out in the open on a square named after it. No glass, no ticket, no rope. Rust red, absurdly heavy, sitting at about ankle height in the middle of a city that walks past it every day. Put a hand on it, then read the label. It is a much stranger object than it looks.

• Sint-Baafskathedraal 500 points

  The east end of the level. Do not stop in the nave. Underneath it there is a crypt older than anything standing over it, and in a side chapel hangs a panel painting that people cross a continent for. Go and stand in front of it. Nobody is timing you.

• Sint-Niklaaskerk 500 points

  Grey-blue stone, and it grows straight out of the market it stands in. Go inside and look straight up at the crossing. The lantern above it is hollow and drops daylight into the nave, so nobody ever had to hang a lamp there. The cheapest lighting scheme on this level, and the oldest.

• Design Museum Gent 250 points

  From the lane it is a townhouse with a very good door. Walk in and the back of it is not a townhouse at all. The whole point of the place is the seam where the old rooms stop and the new ones start, and you can only see that from inside. There are also a great many chairs. I have opinions about chairs.

• Geeraard de Duivelsteen 250 points

  Dark walls, a row of small turrets, and its good face turned to the water rather than to the street. Stand on the far side of the Reep and look across. From the pavement in front you get a wall. From the water you get the reason somebody bothered.

• Hotel d'Hane-Steenhuyse 250 points

  On the Veldstraat, which is the busiest shopping street in town, and you will go straight past it unless somebody tells you. Look for the one doorway in the row that is far too grand to be selling anything. What is behind that door is not a shop and it is not small. Hiding a thing that size in your busiest street is a trick I admire.

• Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 250 points

  A pale eighteenth-century front on the Koningstraat, at the quiet north-east end of the level where the crowds have given up. It is not a museum and it does not want your ticket. Read the name over the door slowly, all of it. It is the longest name on this level and every word in it is doing a job.

• Stadhuis Gent 250 points

  It takes up a whole corner and then it keeps going. Walk the Botermarkt side, turn into the Hoogpoort, and the same address is still beside you. Two street names, one house. I measure everything in street length, so by my reckoning this is the biggest single thing on the level.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Look at the water first. The Leie comes in from one side, the Scheldt from the other, and the old core sits on both banks of both. Dry ground here means sandy rises that get to about fifteen metres above sea level, which in this country passes for mountains. The counts put their castrum between the Leie and a few of its side branches, on the ground that stays out of the wet. Everything you walk today is arranged around that one decision.

Sources: inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be, inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

1100–1384

The counts of Flanders. They built their residence on the west bank of the Leie, in the richest place in their own county, which is a sensible address if you live off what passes through. Around 1100 the town got a belt of water round it, part river and part dug, and the count's castrum sat between the Leie and a few of its side branches. From there the counts held the town and the town held the trade.

Sources: inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be, inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be

1384–1794

Burgundy, and then the family that inherited Burgundy. Philip the Bold held Flanders from 1384, and the dukes kept a palace in town. Charles V was born in it in 1500, which makes him the most local emperor Ghent will ever get and did Ghent no good at all. In 1540 he rewrote the city's charter, abolished the old abbey and put a new stronghold on the ground where it had stood.

Sources: inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be, inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be, inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be

1794–1814

France. From 1794 the whole of the southern Netherlands was under French authority, and Ghent was made the capital of the Scheldt department, one of nine set up in 1795. Churches and convents were sold off as national property or simply taken down. What moved into the gap was the factory: Lieven Bauwens brought in machines, and other people copied him until the town had changed its trade for the first time in centuries.

Sources: inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be

1814–1830

The Netherlands. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna put the southern and the northern Netherlands together into one state under King William I. That government suited Ghent rather well, and in 1816 the city was given a state university out of it. The arrangement lasted fifteen years, which is not a length of time I am able to take seriously.

Sources: www.belgium.be, inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be

1830–

Belgium. A provisional government declared independence on 4 October 1830 and Ghent has been in one country ever since, which on this list counts as an extraordinary run of nothing happening. It was also among the first Belgian cities to be given railway lines. Rails are the one kind of street I have never managed to eat.

Sources: www.belgium.be, inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. This level has a name of its own. Around 1100 a belt of water went round the town, part natural watercourse and part dug ditch, and it left the Ghent ground shaped like a tub: eighty hectares, with the Reep on the east, the Ottogracht on the north-east, the Leie on the north-west, the dug Houtlei on the west and the dug Ketelgracht on the south. That tub is the Kuip, and the Kuip is what you walk here. By about 1300 there was a second circuit thirteen kilometres long around six hundred and forty-four hectares, so the Kuip is the small old core sitting inside the big one.

   Sources: inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be, inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be

2. Ghent is nowhere near the sea, so Ghent dug itself one. Between 1251 and 1269 the city cut a canal forty-five kilometres long out to Damme on the Zwin, about seven years with spades in the ground, and called it the Lieve. It was the first artificial link anybody here knows of, and for centuries it was the crucial connection between this town and open water. Forty-five kilometres of digging to shorten a journey. That is exactly how I do my arithmetic.

   Sources: inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be, inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be

3. People were standing on this ground a very long time before anyone thought of a city. Flint tools near the Sint-Pietersabdij put travelling people here around 9600 to 9000 BC. On the Goudenleeuwplein, a square you cross on this level, they turned up flint and pottery from the Neolithic. The densest Roman finds sit at the river junction and cover the first century through to the fourth. Under the paving there is more paving. It goes down a good deal further than you would expect.

   Sources: inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 200streets
• 1,760dots
• 27.0km of street
• 34.7km on foot
• 9.9hours at a stroll