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Object #11 - Entrance to Het Heideken

18th century

City Life

Taverne. Auberge. Assommoir. Early-19th century Brussels did not want for drinking dens, prime among them medieval inns that had evolved into cabarets. Not Liza Minelli-haunted, Nazi-satirizing theatres but dimly-lit, sparsely furnished establishments for the city’s working men to slip into for a draw on their pipe and a tankard of Cuyte. Writing in the 1880s, Brussels-born Camille Lemonnier captured the mood of the Brussels cabaret:

“....almost all of them extend in a narrow passage under a low ceiling, varnished by smoke, with a corner for the counter; the largest would hold barely thirty people….The sink, the kitchen, the room lie on the same plane, through a mist of vapors rising from the pots; and the smell of the stoves spreads among the customers, in hot and continual puffs. No coquetry of crockery or silverware either; plates are placed in front of you, with pewter cutlery, on a rough napkin; the public is seen by the caterer as a working machine that does not need tempting by refinements."

Someone seeking fresh air and respite from the oppressive city might make for an out-of-town cabaret in Brussels’ agricultural hinterland. Villages like Hembeek, Watermael, and Boondael were long a destination for city residents yearning for some greenery and a good beer. Out beyond the city walls, cabarets doubled as inns, breweries, creameries, and farms. Places like Uccle’s Misverstand, Jette’s Ferme de Wilg, or Het Heideken in Ganshoren.

Originally a farm, the Heideken had evolved by the 1800s into an all-purpose auberge-ferme. It comprised two buildings - a sagging white cottage and a more upright red-bricked building - corralled by a small terrace and facing onto a large green. Stamped on the redbrick building's arched white stone  entrance was the Heideken's construction date, 1647. In the courtyard, chickens pecked grain from between uneven cobblestones. Inside, the floors were of bare wood, on the walls shelves of crockery and small, framed portraits. Cabinets stacked with glassware stood behind a small bar, and rags hung drying before the fireplace. 

Around wooden chairs and small tables, customers tucked into glasses of Lambic and plates of tartine au fromage blanc. Like many of its contemporaries, the Heideken was a centre of communal life. It hosted the local archery club, who practised on the green. Local artist circles met there, sharing tables with members of Ganshoren’s municipal council who used the Heideken as an ersatz town hall in the absence of a real one.

And like many of its contemporaries, the Heideken was unable to resist a fast-encroaching and rapidly-suburbanising city that was absorbing the rural villages on its edge. Brussels subsumed Ganshoren in 1954, but by then the Heideken and its centuries-old bucolic tableau had been obliterated, the cabaret demolished to make way for a new suburban tram.  

All that remains of the Heideken is its name on a nearby street and its stone entrance. Salvaged and repurposed, the white archway now stands forgotten and moss-rotten under a yawning willow tree, a memorial to the neighbourhood’s vanished rural past.