As a country district on the edge of Antwerp, Zurenborg had the first tram route in the city - horse drawn from Zurenborg to the great market of Antwerp. Zurenborg's pleasure gardens, like those of Vauxhall in London, drew crowds who were then served by steam trams with Zurenborg becoming, as it is today, a major public transport interchange - rail, bus and tram. The addition of the railway to Zurenborg elevated the junction into a rôle as a traffic interchange with farmed goods, milk, bricks, timber and coal going into the city and nightsoil going out to be spread on the land.

Such a busy interchange drew the inevitable housing development. In much the same way that London's suburbs grew along the railway land (indeed the railways were property developers on a grand scale) so Zurenborg became a place where the rich could have houses built beyond the crowded confines of the city. In Britain Georgian pattern books were used by builders well into the late nineteenth century and builders such as Cubit gave a uniformity to housing terraces. Here in Zurenborg however each building had its own architect - a tradition continued today in Belgian towns where householders buy plots of land and commission architects to design houses for them, giving much more individuality to suburban development than the commercial uniformity of British estates.

The Zurenborg development differed from most in that the plots and their houses were large, and the terrace model reigned as the major influence, few of the houses being detached. Architectural styles are far from uniform ranging from pure art deco through to pompous historical pastiche. The photographs here are just some photographed on a walk through the district (more can be seen in the Gallery in the DesignClub). I will not attempt to follow the path of the walk, but simply to show some of the fine details and form of the houses, letting the images speak for themselves on this and the following pages.

I am grateful to Karin Kasteloot of the Universiteit Antwerpen Stadscampus, Secretariaat Departement Beleidsinformatica for taking me on the walk in the first place and for producing detailed documentation on the houses, which were apparently not protected until the 1990's. They alone justify a visit to Antwerp!

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