The case against Brussels' rooftop bars
“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.“ William Gibson* (*maybe)
This weekend the sun finally came out after the wettest March in a century. Most of us were probably too preoccupied with finding a terrace to sit out on to worry about the implications that come with Saturday being the hottest April 6 on record. Brussels does outdoor drinking well, and the arrival of tables and chairs blocking narrow footpaths and squares across town is as sure a sign that summer is coming as the swallows returning and the streets smelling of stale piss.
In recent years a new kind of terrace emerged in Brussels, taking its place beside the corner bars and car-free squares. The rooftop bar terrace isn’t really that new but in the summer of 2023 it felt as if the idea had reached a critical mass, that it was becoming a trend. Website headlines started flagging the “5 rooftop bars to enjoy the summer”, and at one point it seemed every hotel and cultural centre with a bit of idle roof space was opening a pop-up bar. Alongside ones at places like Bozar and the royal library came the Hoxton hotel’s Tope bar and the rooftop beer bar at the Bourse. Leading the pack though was Rooftop 58 on the ninth floor of Brucity, the city’s newly-built administration building.
One of the attractions of Rooftop 58 when I visited shortly after it opened in June last year was that the stink of urine doesn’t reach nine floors up. The view out over Brussels’ higgledy piggledy rooftops was pretty good too. The city isn’t famed for its impressive skyline. It doesn’t have anything like the order of Parisian mansard roofs, or London’s glass and steel irruptions. But whereas at street level it’s often hard to understand how Brussels was put together, high up you can see how the city fits together (or doesn’t), and how it follows the lumps and troughs of the river valleys in which it was built.
Sitting there trying not to listen to the conversations of the tourists next to me with their backpacks wrapped around their torsos, I had a nagging thought. To get up to the bar I’d had to queue up at ground floor lifts, where a man was waiting to riffle through bags to prevent contraband water and food making it to the roof. Past him, there was another man in charge of the lifts and crowd control. I didn’t have any trouble getting in, save for a long wait, but then I don’t look like a troublemaker. I did wonder would they refuse entry to someone they did consider a potential threat to the order of their carefully curated experience. The bar’s aesthetic and the drinkers in their pastels, Stan Smiths and maxi dresses, made clear that was a moot point. They don’t make their way to a place like this, and it screams “this place isn’t for you”.
Opening the roof up to the public - alongside the bar there’s also an observation deck area - that funded its construction is a laudable aim, but what kind of public are we talking about? One that can afford to spend €8 on a plate of (admittedly good) hummus and flatbread, for starters, which doesn’t exactly scream inclusive and democratic.
You can’t say that about the building it replaced. Itself constructed on the ruins of the city’s old fruit and vegetable market, Parking 58 was a half-derelict suburban multistorey plopped down in central Brussels halfway to dereliction by the time I came to know it. Before its demolition to make way for BruCity, the car park had been reappropriated for raves, for parties, and by skaters. There was no one regulating entry, and you didn’t even need to buy a parking ticket. You just needed to find the right lift, and ride it all the way up to the roof. City administrators did Brussels a favour by knocking the eyesore down, but with it went a democratic space open to anyone, with few caveats.
The same young people evicted from the roof of the parking lot were protesting about the privatisation of public space at ground level around the same time as Rooftop 58’s opening. Their ire was specifically prompted by the disappearance of public benches because of the expansion of restaurant terraces at nearby Place St Catherine, a wider sense of the inner city being turned into an “amusement park for tourists”, and concerns by urbanists that the city’s non-spaces were being trampled on by commercial imperatives and urban “activations” like BruCity’s rooftop bar.
Thinking I was maybe a little too contrarian, I took advantage of the weekend’s sun to give them another chance - this time at the Hoxton. Tope is a “Mexican-inspired” restaurant and rooftop bar on the top floor of the 76 metre-tall Victoria Tower. The midcentury not-quite-skyscraper, which used to house IBM’s Belgian headquarters, underwent a protracted renovation before re-opening last year as a mixed-use site comprising offices, co-working space, and a hotel.
Tope is extremely tasteful, decorated in a sort of Santa Fe modernism with a millennial sheen - earthy red walls and green tiled tables, cacti in large clay pots, and an abundance of wood, glass, and wicker chairs. The view, framed by the building’s large white steel girders, is better Rooftop 58’s because the building is both taller and higher up in the landscape, taking in the Altitude Cent church steeple to the south, the VRT antenna tower to the east, Koekelberg’s basilica and the Cité Moderne behind it to the west, and what looks like Mechelen’s Sint-Romboutstoren over 20 kilometres away.
The city looks very far away from up here. In J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise, one of the characters describes entering the building of the title as like travelling 30 years into the future, escaping London’s crowded streets, traffic hold-ups, and other inconveniences of modern city living. In Ballard’s tower people no longer care what happens to the people living two floors below them, never mind people beyond the building’s walls. Residents eventually lose the desire to leave their tower altogether, sealing themselves off from the outside world.
It’s not hard to see the same instinct behind the mushrooming in Brussels of rooftop bars in recent years. In the same summer that both Rooftop 58 and Tope opened, it felt as if Brussels was teetering on the edge of social collapse. A crack epidemic was ripping through the city’s homeless community, a population whose numbers have quadrupled since 2008. Public drug use in metro stations appeared rampant, and the security situation at Gare du Midi became a national - and European - cause célèbre. Things don’t feel like they have improved since. It feels like a week hasn’t gone by this year without deadly gangland shootings or stabbings making the news. The panic about public security has spread from the train stations to what feels like the whole city. Youth unemployment, filthy air, dirty streets - Brussels’ politicians appear ill-equipped to deal with its structural issues. I’m not a catastrophist, and I think Brussels is a better place to live now than when I arrived in 2009, never mind the dark days of the 1980s when places like St Géry were no-go zones. But the city feels exhausted, politically and psychologically. No wonder people might want to flee from the chaos.
Look, I don’t expect the Hoxton’s hotel bar to be a democratic space, and maybe complaining about it not being one is shooting fish in a barrel. But it, and places like Rooftop 58, feel a little like an urbanism of resignation, the construction of airborne playgrounds for people with enough financial and cultural capital to enjoy themselves where the air is clean and the grime is at one remove. Nor am I saying we shouldn't bother making the most of every square metre of Brussels land. Elsewhere in the city there are projects that represent a different kind of urbanism, one promoting production rather than consumption - roof gardens, urban apiaries and greenhouses, and the large aquaponic farm on the roof of Anderlecht’s abattoir. And then there are the plans for a rooftop swimming pool on the same site, a public building to serve the surrounding population in one of the least green, most polluted, and poorest parts of Brussels. This is the urbanism we should be aspiring to in Brussels, open, inclusive, and democratic. Not gated communities in the sky.
Ballard’s high-rise dwellers found they couldn’t escape the outside world, their society became an even more brutal and grotesque reflection of life outside the tower. I don’t think the customers drinking at Tope or Rooftop 58 are about to commit murder, incest, cannibalism, or eat their pets. As Ballard himself wrote, the future “isn’t going to be like Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four: it’s going to be like a country-club paradise.” The kind of place where people sit at rooftop hotel bars drinking €6 small pours of house Mexican Lager - no cash, only card - from chunky glasses with too-thick rims talking loudly about the problems with their tennis serve.
Sitting out on Tope’s terrace I can still hear, above the jangly world music and the loud English tourists, the incessant police sirens from 75 metres below. The chaos of Brussels will be waiting for them when they descend the elevators to street level. And thinking again that I was too harsh on Rooftop 58 the first time I visited, I walked down the hill and across Adolphe Max - dodging unfinished roadworks and piles of white rubbish bags - to give it another try. But there was already a large clump of people formed at the entrance waiting for their turn to ride the lift up. I didn’t have time for all that. Turning away back to Place de Brouckère I saw looming up in front of me the see-through Muntcentrum tower, undergoing its own wholesale renovation. And I remembered there’s going to be a roof terrace there too.
Miscellaneous Notes
I got my copy of High-Rise at the Muntpunt library. Muntpunt is great.
We’re really into election time now (Brussels holds its regional elections on June 9). Interesting to see how media from the two language communities have rated this term’s government, and where they put their emphasis in their criticisms
Yesterday evening I went on a mini pub crawl through Matongé with my friend Rich, going in for a beer at places I’ve walked past 100s of times but was too timid to into by myself. Expect the experience to feature in a future Brussels Beer City Podcast episode.
What’s Happening
I mentioned the film Brussels By Night in a previous newsletter, and now it’s director Marc Didden will host a screening and Q&A at the Palace cinema at the end of the month.
Also in April is the return of the Scéal Eile Irish film festival in cinemas around town. Particularly looking forward to the documentary on the North Circular. Details here.
Ammo, the brilliant illustrator behind Brasserie de la Mule’s label artwork, has an exhibition of his work with three other artists opening on Friday, 12 April at La Vallée in Molenbeek. Details here.
The Festival of the New European Bauhaus (yeah, me neither) is on at the Jubelpark all weekend.
Beer and Argentinian steak? If I wasn’t a vegetarian I’d be there (at CoHop).
Brussels’ late-night museum visit series Nocturnes is back for another year, starting Friday.
I miss Parking58 - big regrets I didn't spend time taking arty shots of it's Brutalist/Modernist slopes. Was certainly never brave enough to go up it or look for some counter-culture, just admired & feared it from street level! Didn't expect it to be gone by the time I'd made my next visit to the city.