In No Part Of
Europe, Perhaps, Save In Parts Of Lancashire And Yorkshire, Do You
Find So Many Big Towns
In so limited a space; yet the strips of
country that lie between, though often intolerably dull, are
(unlike the
Strips in Yorkshire) intensely rural in character.
Belgian towns do not sprawl in endless, untidy suburbs, as
Sheffield sprawls out towards Rotherham, and Bradford towards
Leeds. Belgian towns, moreover - again unlike our own big cities in
England - are mostly extremely handsome, and generally contrive,
however big, to retain, at any rate in their heart, as at Antwerp,
or in the Grande Place at Brussels, a striking air of antiquity;
whilst some fairly big towns, such as Malines and Bruges, are
mediaeval from end to end. This, of course, is not true of Belgian
Luxembourg and the region of the Ardennes, where the population is
much more sparse; where we do not stumble, about every fifteen
miles or so, on some big town of historic name; and where the
endless chessboard of little fields that lies, for example,
between Ghent and Oudenarde, or between Malines and Louvain, is
replaced by long contours of sweeping limestone wold, often
covered with rolling wood.
Ypres is distinguished above all cities in Belgium by the huge
size and stately magnificence of its lordly Cloth Hall, or Halles
des Drapiers. So vast, indeed, is this huge building, and so flat
the surrounding plain, that it is said that it is possible from
the strangely isolated hill of Cassel, which lies about eighteen
miles away to the west, just over the border, in France, on a
really clear day - I have only climbed it myself, unluckily, in a
fog of winter mist - to distinguish in a single view, by merely
turning the head, the clustering spires of Laon, the white chalk
cliffs of Kent, and this vast pile of building, like a ship at
sea, that seems to lie at anchor in the heart of the "sounding
plain." Nothing, perhaps, in Europe is so strangely significant of
vanished greatness - not even Rome, with its shattered Forum, or
Venice, with a hundred marble palaces - as this huge fourteenth-
century building, with a facade that is four hundred and thirty-
six feet long, and with its lofty central tower, that was built
for the pride and need of Ypres, and as a market for the barter of
its priceless linens, at a time when Ypres numbered a population
of two hundred thousand souls (almost as big as Leicester at the
present day), and was noisy with four thousand busy looms; whereas
now it has but a beggarly total of less than seventeen thousand
souls (about as big as Guildford), and is only a degree less
sleepy than Malines or Bruges-la-Morte. Ypres, again, like Arras,
has lent its name to commerce, if diaper be really rightly derived
from the expression "linen of Ypres." The Cloth Hall fronts on to
the Grande Place, and, indeed, forms virtually one side of it; and
behind, in the Petite Place, is the former cathedral of St.
Martin.
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