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This is going to be a tribute, a tribute to Charleroi. A city that took its shape in the 19th century and now struggles to get along in this post-industrial era.


Now, why am I so cautious ….“tribute” is too neutral a word for my enduring fascination with Charleroi.

It was not the most obvious choice for a train trip, that Saturday a very long time ago. What, after all, might a 22 year old economics student, working on a dissertation on internal audit, hope to find in Charleroi? It had of course the advantage of being a place where I had never been before. And then there was the map, with its French street names, with the blue of the river Sambre & the inexplicably romantic consonance of “Quai de la gare” and with its “Ville Basse” & “Ville Haute” which kindled expectations of urban sophistication.

I cannot remember whether I was disappointed at first – when upon leaving the station I found a river that bore more resemblance to an industrial canal than to the Seine, when I walked along a bare Quai that had no Left Bank airs whatsoever.
But I do still have many souvenirs of that first trip, of my wandering about dark, wet, autumn streets & of coming gradually under the spell of that particular mix of decaying industrial upper class splendour, neighbourhoods gone to seed & gaudy shopping streets.
How avidly I walked that maze of streets – all laid out according to an eminently bourgeois city plan with that typical tissue of boulevards & squares with statues & parks & pompous schools & a neo-classical museum & a splendid art nouveau town hall.
Walking those streets, I also grew aware of the ominous presence on the horizon of greyish-orange clouds fanning out from smoke stacks, of jagged factory-contours and the silent bulk of rusting silos.
When the rain started to heave down heavily, I remember seeking refuge in a neon-lit station-café with wooden tables & chairs, tiled floor and a clientele of solitary regulars, who were only mildly curious about passers-through such as that coffee drinking & chain smoking youngster, reading “Le Soir”, occasionally looking up to peer into the dark outside.

At any rate, this autumnal Charleroi-trip proved to be seminal, prefiguring many of my later explorations of other struggling post-industrial towns.
The past weighs so heavily in these towns, but it is a disaffected past, not a glorified one. Once at the vanguard of capitalistic progress, these cities have been drained of entrepreneurial zeal by the turn in economic fortune. They are so vulnerable now, so pathetic an example of how the bourgeois superstructure crumbles together with the decline in the productive industrial base.
Perhaps there lies their attraction: they bear the impress of frantic human activity, of a century of human inventiveness and enterprise, full of great contradictions and injustices.
And the sheer tactile materiality of their fate! – the brick&mortar, the iron&steel – whether still in use or not, those factories have a sensuous, heavy presence which today’s centres of the service economy utterly lack.

But why choose Charleroi for a tribute? Liverpool is grander, Detroit more fabulously ruined Valenciennes is sleepier, Roubaix darker and Manchester & Lille are certainly more inspiring in their dogged resurrection efforts.

So why choose Charleroi …
Perhaps because of the train ride there, leaving Brussels by the back-entry as it were and offering glimpses through the train window of industrial landscapes one hardly knew still existed.

Or because of the initial crush of course: I am a loyal & faithful lover of cities

Or is it because of the avenue Paul Pastur with its range of moods, its sensitivity to the different hues of the seasons.

This avenue Paul Pastur: it leads from the dreariest station back-streets of Charleroi to Mont-sur-Marchienne, a banal hamlet which is home to a convent that was converted into a photo museum. One of those laudable efforts to revive decaying industrial towns by investing in the cultural industry. And though the museum doesn’t draw huge crowds, its program directors unrelentingly set up new, interesting exhibitions.

To me museum & avenue are inextricably bound up in one meaningful experience.
The photo museum, besides forming the official excuse to go out there, sharpens the senses & the mind with its formalised aesthetics and concepts.
The Avenue Paul Pastur’s role is to offer the illusion of a journey and to speak to the heart & the senses with its wealth of traces of unrecorded past & current lives, with its endearing rituals of every day provincial goings-about. It is like a river, “throwing up a crowd of twisted things”, like a river inviting to walk & walk & just follow its course & see the surroundings change gradually.
And walking along it, in a photographic cast of mind, one feels as elated as a beachcomber, compulsively taking photos of its many waiting-to-be-found views.

Ah, and I have walked that road many times – in sweltering summer heat, through winter snow storms, on golden autumn days.

The first Paul Pastur walk, 10 years ago – I had just turned thirty, was on a luminous autumn day, the kind of day of which TS Eliot writes: “what is the late November doing with the disturbance of the spring”.
Even now, looking at those photos, I am still startled by their warm, golden glow. Hopper’s “Elation of sunlight” at work, fusing in the day’s glow such disparate elements as a rusty silo, a boxed-in canal, a giant Coca Cola goblet at a road café, a former mine-engineer’s mansion behind a stone wall (with that anachronistic Citroen BX, incongruous but somehow fitting in with that day’s luminous magic).

Oh, and there’s that bland non-descript day, a day with homogeneous, slightly soiled light neutrality. The day I was taken in by the irresistibly blooming entrepreneurial activity along that road: tempted to make an illustrated atlas of Belgian economic small town activity.

And the summer days on the avenue Paul Pastur! Even with an overcast sky, the green in walled gardens and on wastelands surprises by its lushness. And then one notices again how the avenue Paul Pastur truly is a social microcosm: there are the unassuming worker homes, the middle class houses with neatly trimmed front lawns (with pond&rocks&little windmill), the mysterious mansions behind walls and also a row of lovely art deco houses (undoubtedly built in a rare urbanistic élan of social & aesthetical responsibility) and the inevitable high rises, always looking dishevelled. .


Leafing through all the photos I took along that road , I am struck by the differences in hues, the variation in colour tones amongst different days’ photos. How they range from slightly oppressing in neutral light over luminous golden to heroically & darkly wintry. There are photos imbued with the vaguely threatening silence of smouldering summer light, others with a windblown, rainy quality. I think not only music has its minor and major keys, the days have their tonality too, formalized in colour hues, and yes, also impacting on the mood.

Take that sweltering summer day, when I was just back from a Detroit visit, so versed in post-industrial threats. How uncanny the horizon looked – that looming factory skyline with in the foreground an improbable yellow-green field.

To be ctd …