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Object #2 - Zenne River Water

2 million years old (but this sample collected July 2021)

City Life

Brussels was born where, on a narrowing bend of the Senne river, the valiant Saint Gorik of Cambrai slayed a troublesome  dragon.

Brussels was born where, on a narrowing bend of the Senne river, a Duke of Lower Lotharingia built a fortified camp.

Brussels was born where, on a narrowing bend in the Senne river, a loosely-connected network of villages on the riverbank coalesced into an urban settlement.

Two of these are myth and one is as close to a factual retelling of the founding of Brussels’ first millennium origins you will get. But they share a common character: the Zenne. Brussels exists because of the Zenne. When the city makes one of its first textual appearances in 966 as Broucsella, it’s watery origins are already clear - the name is a combination of brouc (brook or marsh) and sele (habitation). And it was on the steep banks of the Zenne that Brussels gradually emerged in the 11th and 12th centuries as an economic, political, and ecclesiastical centre. The river was central to the lives of these early inhabitants. It slaked their thirst, powered their mills, connected traders in Antwerp and the Rhine, irrigated their crops, and sustained their fisheries. 

It also lubricated their breweries. Right from its founding, Brussels’ residents tinkered with the Zenne digging channels and creating new man-made islands. The Grand Île was one of these, engineered in the 11th century and home to a church honouring the mythical dragonslayer. It was here that the densest congregation of Brussels breweries emerged, remaining a brewing centre even as the Zenne’s influence on Brussels’ form and function declined. These were household breweries, or breweries in outhouses, cantilevered over the river and brewing for the neighbouring streets in the most populous district in Brussels. The earliest brewers harvested the Zenne to make beer, their successors extracting water to clean their equipment.

When this early modern artisanal occupation morphed into a semi-industrial business, the river was a useful outlet for brewery effluent. By the 1860s the brewers of the Grand Île (rechristened Place St Gery), alongside their neighbours the tanneries, paper factories, and textile producers, were complicit in the Zenne’s irreversible corruption. In 1865 Brussels’ city government voted to bury what was now a nauseating, miasmic, fetid stream. Above the river’s brick sarcophagus came central Brussels’ urbane Haussmannian boulevards, the building of which obliterated from the urban landscape the last remaining breweries of St Gery and centuries-long brewing heritage. 

The Zenne still meanders furtively above-ground in Anderlecht, and its cultural memory and that of its tributaries survives. It’s there in the names of districts like Etterbeek, Molenbeek, and Woluwe. Or in street names like Zennestraat or Rue du Pont, and in downtown Brussels’ lumpy topography . Brussels’ 21st century beer revival has brought breweries back to St Gery and surrounding streets, to brewi above the Zenne where predecessors would have worked next to it. Then there is Brasserie de la Senne, vanguard of this renaissance and named for the river that birthed its owners’ beloved Brussels.