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I am not an urban explorer. I do not have the gumption for it. Abandoned buildings unsettle me, for what their decrepitude implies, and I have never been one to trespass. Presented with a fenced off building my instinct is to stay on the right side of the law, and of the fence. But occasionally I do give in to the siren’s call, seduced by the possibility of what a ruin might reveal about the history of a place and the thrill of going where you are not supposed to. And in Brussels, there is no shortage of ruins.
There is one near my house, the skeleton of an abandoned gasworks on Rue des Fuchsias. It, and the accompanying brick chimney of the sort you can watch Fred Dibnah shimmy up on grainy youtube clips, is the last remnant of an old power station that supplied the factories of the surrounding Molenbeek streets with electricity when the commune was still worthy of the nickname “Petit Manchester”. But like most of Molenbeek’s industrial relics, it has been left to rot, boarded up and unloved and unwanted as depopulation, deindustrialisation, and decentralisation have eroded their raison d'être.
I like places like the gasworks because they are a portal back to another time, and another Brussels, one which was confident - brash even - about its place as the industrial, political, and commercial motor of a unitary Belgium. It is a Brussels that is hard to imagine sometimes, but these old mastodons give us just a little hint. Of course, there is no sign or information panel about the gasworks on Rue des Fuchsia. Depending which direction you approach it from, it is virtually invisible and a casual passerby would only know that it is there, hiding amongst the tall trunks and thick tree cover of a small, accidental urban forest, by stepping back across the street ot the opposite pavement and squinting hard to make out the rusted terracotta pillars and the latticed horizontal beams that connect them.
To the outside world it might as well not exist, just another parcel of unowned scrubland, a brownfield site left to return to nature in the absence of a government masterplan or a developer’s blueprints. Are the authorities embarrassed by its existence and what its dilapidation says about their political impotence? Or are they cowed by the ambition and history it represents, when compared to their own, diminished, legacies? Maybe they are afraid of being revealed as being like the mediaeval Roman peasants who built their homes in the arches of the Colosseum, incapable of grasping the enormity of this inheritance from an alien civilisation.
There is however a sign telling passersby that this section of Rue des Fuchsias - comprising a small park and behind it the fenced-off hollow where the gasworks is located - is off limits between the hours of 9pm and 7am. There are also signs, tied to a pockmarked green chainlink fence that surrounds the gasworks, warning against flytipping. There is no one around save for an old man half bent double and scrabbling around for discarded cigarette butts. I have walked past many times, and wondered what it was like down there in the hollow, standing in the middle of the hexagonal structure. Most days I keep on walking, but today I decide is the day.
The hollow where the gasworks was built is three or so metres below street level, separated from the park by first the metal fence and behind that a wooden one that has come apart in several places. There is a large gap at one end, big enough for two people to pass through and where the mud and brush has been tamped smooth. The hollow’s walls are steep and rutted with exposed roots. I half slide, half skip down grasping an errant branch to slingshot me over and onto the flat ground at the bottom.
It is clear the site has not been wholly abandoned. A waterlogged mustard-coloured mattress pokes out from under a makeshift shelter of branches, next to which is a tangle of discarded blue and red clothing grimy with mud and caught in a briar bush. The bush gets thicker the deeper I go and I have to scramble over and around fallen branches. The trees grow close and tall beside each other, there is a pair of translucent plastic bags hanging from a tree at eye height, weighed down with something round and dark. Beneath them is a dayglo cylinder of laughing gas, and everywhere are shards of a smashed bottle of brown glass. When I get to where I assumed I would be standing in the centre of the hexagon, I can see nothing that suggests there is a gasworks building here at all. I think maybe I have lost my bearings and I am surrounded by thick tree trunks covered for several metres in dense green ivy. I look up to see if I can make out the top of the structure, but the trees are too densely packed next to one another and clouds have dulled the sunlight. I cannot distinguish trunk from beam.
I should mute my headphones. I have told no one what I am doing or where I have gone. When I slipped off the road and into the hollow I did not look to see if anyone was observing me. The muffled snap of twigs underfoot I heard a minute ago, was that definitely me? Time to return to the surface. Ascending is easier and I scramble up the side of the hollow with the aid of a couple of roots, to escape through the hole in the fence and back into the bright afternoon. I cross the street and look back. There again I can see the rust red support beams, the terracotta pillars of the gasworks still in their hexagonal formation.
The chill I felt in the hollow is gone, but I remain a little bewildered by this apparent mirage. I toy with the idea that this place could be under some kind of enchantment, not enchantment in the Disney sense of the word but more akin to the Irish idea of a fairy fort, a cursed place, a repository of magic and mystery in a city which is not magical, a place that appears and disappears and where men fear to tread. Maybe it is good that we leave the gasworks to its own devices. Maybe it is meant to be left alone. Maybe it is better to be herding goats in the shadow of the Great Pyramid than poking around in the pharaoh’s tombs, where we do not belong.
*Sorry Ewan and Shane