"Quatre Bras farmhouse has been demolished" Topic

For those TMP'ers who may not yet know…

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How was that allowed to happen!

Does Belgium not have an organisation similar to English Heritage who could have preserved it?

Philistines!!

Part of the problem in a country like Belgium is that so much of the country has been a battlefield at one time or another. You can hardly preserve everything and many places & buildings have less significance to Belgians than they do to other nations.

Britain's 'heritage' legislation has been responsible for stunting development on many occasions as well as saving important sites. There is a good deal less logic in the process than one might hope for and it seems to be a career path for jobsworths and failed historians.

Sad. GF: good points.

It strikes me that the Belgian tourist board has again scored another own goal with this.

The fiasco at the 200 anniversary, perhaps they needed a little more notice and now this is are not only a historical loss but also a potentially financial one.

The Belgian WW1 battlefields are proof that good marketing can generate tourist income.

If you visit the US Civil war battlefields you will easily appreciate that when done properly, a nations history can generate tremendous revenue as well as being a monument to the past.

Chris

Kind of a weird situation, it was privately owned. Seems if the govt wants to protect it then it needs to take ownership of it or arrange a trust for it. Letting it stay in private hands and then saying the owners can't do anything with the property kind of negates the point of private property. Still sort of sad to see though.

I don't know how many people actually complained about it, but sadly, I guess there were just not enough of us. It should make us more alert for any future attempts to destroy historical sites.

Daler kind of nailed it. Private property is private property. The loss of this house does not change the fact that a battle during the Hundred Days was fought there. If that were the case then the battlefield ceased to exist when all the woods were cut down many years ago.

Shame to see it go but we really don't have a say in the matter.

Sad, yes but

It strikes me that the Belgian tourist board has again scored another own goal with this.

A big building, by a road, in the middle of nothing, does not the tourist buck make.

Kind of a weird situation, it was privately owned. Seems if the govt wants to protect it then it needs to take ownership of it or arrange a trust for it. Letting it stay in private hands and then saying the owners can't do anything with the property kind of negates the point of private property. Still sort of sad to see though.

This is the nub. If they had let the owners develop the property, say by keeping the shell but making it into a luxury barn conversion, then we might have a building still. Planning a preservation sometimes get things very badly wrong. If the government (and that's us, BTW) want to preserve things we must buy and pay for them (with our taxes – possibly by paying more of them) or allow development to aid preservation.

It should make us more alert for any future attempts to destroy historical sites.

As said, very sad, but bravo the owner for sticking his fingers up at us all. He would have had his price, I'm sure, but we were not prepared to pay it. Getting out your placard, and going all NIMBY, doesn't solve anything in the long run. Money is the issue here.

How much can one really preserve and how much would it cost? It was falling down and decrepit.

How much care was taken to preserve the site of the Battle of Long Island? Braddock's ambush?

Certainly one has to be realistic. Not everything can be preserved – space, money, practical considerations etc.

Here, however, we have one of the most iconic buildings from one of the most famous battles in world history. Very sad, and I think a huge wasted potential.

I'm sure the owner was in a difficult situation, but I don't think I'd go so far as to applaud him with a "bravo."

I certainly don't have a ready solution, other than the government throwing some money at the problem – although I have a hunch this may have paid off in the long run.

Braddock's ambush?

Surprisingly, there is still not much at Braddock's grave site.

As it was stated before, it's private property. His/hers to make or break. Now we can't go around telling folks what to do with their money and still call ourselves a democracy can we?

Did the farmhouse have any actual significance to the battle? If I'm not mistaken, most of the action took place south of the hamlet.

Stephen

You don't normally own an old building, you're more of a custodian. When you're dead in twenty or thirty years the building will still be there.

Thank goodness for our National Park Service, the Civil War Trust and other groups. I was at Gettysburg and Antietam this pass summer and was very impress with the job the NPS is doing with a very limited budget. Otherwise we would have Disney's Civil War theme park in the middle of the Bull Run battlefield.

These folks in Belgium perpetrated a crime. Fifty years from now someone or some group will be trying to re-build it to the way it look. They cold have moved it instead of tearing it down.

"How much can one really preserve and how much would it cost? It was falling down and decrepit."

It could have been repaired and preserved it is only a matter of labor and money. You should see what the NPS manages to do with volunteers. The cost to save it isn't the issue.

"How much care was taken to preserve the site of the Battle of Long Island? Braddock's ambush?"

Exactly! That is the best argument for preserving what we have left.

So you would shut down for development several miles of Brooklyn simply because a battle was fought there? And Pittsburg?
What about the farmers who owned the land in which the battles were fought? Do they have no say in their land?

Is there a sliding scale of "Battle Importance" that decides which ones should be preserved? Not every battlefield can, or should be preserved.
I mentioned two that had cities grow up around them. Must we preserve Stalingrad exactly as it was when the Germans were driven off? Is the city allowed to rebuild?
London after the Blitz? Should the ruins be preserved as is?

"Luckily" most of the ACW was fought in rural territory. So the sites are kind of sort of easily preserved. But that should NEVER do away with private property rights. How many battlefields had "Wheatfields" or " Cornfields" or "Peach Orchards" associated with them? Obviously, these were part of farms, whose crops were ruined that season, and conceivably for several seasons to come. "Sorry. Can't have your farm back. We will want to put in a National Park here in 100 years. This was a REALLY important battle. Not just a mere skirmish. And you better not let your heirs put in a Walmart!"

There is this…

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…in Virginia. It was falling apart. It was on the National Historic Site registry.

Before:

After:

There is a heritage department in Belgium but to make sure they wouldn't get in the way of modern development they have been assigned to those in charge of working with developers on new projects.

So you can have a building listed and protected and then you can demolish it anyway if the same department thinks it's warranted.

Another major factor foreigners cannot understand is how everything is divided not only along political, but also linguistic lines.

Everything in Belgium has to take the various linguistic communities into account, even those that seem too far out of the way. Also Belgium's history only goes back to 1830.

Take Waterloo.

It's now part of the French community, but used to be Flemish speaking and when you look at it, other than that a few locals fought under foreign banners, there is no real room to exploit this in the scope of Belgian or even community level politics. IE it doesn't really generate votes.

It has some European value and it's very much a local affair, with the various communes vying with each other to be the place where the battle happened. It's only called Waterloo because Wellington happened to have his HQ there, technically the battle was fought on what is today Braine L'Alleud. For years Waterloo wasn't interested in the whole affair and Braine wasn't really going crazy either, but it was the tiny commune of Plançenoit who for years welcomed the only sizeable event around Waterloo.

But as 2015 approached, people woke up to the opportunities and before you know it, the people who had been doing this for years were being pulled up the hierarchy because suddenly everyone wanted to get involved and wanted a piece of the cake.

As a side note Plancenoit is rapidly becoming a very popular place for people to build their luxury villa a stone's throw from Brussels, but in a nice countryside environment. And being rich NIMBY's they are starting to become increasingly more vocal about that outrageous display being perpetrated on their brand new doorstep … Which means that more events in Plancenoit become increasingly more unlikely.

As for the farmhouse, Waterloo has been an expensive affair, politicians promised themselves they would make a ton of money and triple the number of visitors, which so far hasn't happened.

The French community doesn't really have the kind of money to buy places and have them restored, it took quite a bit of outrage from all over the world to prod the people in charge of Hougoumont to at least do something to prevent it from collapsing before 2015 had rolled around.

Waterloo isn't interesting for politicians because it's not something they can use as a political tool, that's why any incentive has to come from the bottom up and they have to use blackmail and shaming to get anything even remotely done, so the fact that Quatre Bras has been demolished comes as no surprise …

It is a shame but a couple of points:

-The farm at Quatre Bras was used as a hospital during the battle. It was last used as a disco.

- Quatre Bras is just a cross road with not much more there now than in 1815! The nearest town is Frasnes which has a private golf club that has indeed preserved one of the other farm houses (Piramount). The farm at the center of the battle, Gemoncourt, is still a working farm.

So it is not like the farm at the crossroads was standing in the way of private development. Comparing the area to Brooklyn is ludicrous. Certainly that area is not comparable to the onslaught of private development that is Northern Virginia, one may recall the near loss of Bull Run.

Really the issues were more complex in this case, much having to do with the owner. It sat abandoned for quite awhile. My understanding is that there was more to the owners business dealings that effected the situation as well. As Patrick noted not much interest and money for preservation anyway. (I hope Plancenoit does not change too drastically, there is a nice café right by the church great for a beer after touring the battlefield!)

Well we won, and we'll win again, hopefully this time we will insist on a real monument to freeing Europe from its own tyranny again. The Belgians are a strange lot (I should know one of my best mates is a Flem and he'll be horrified too, being a total Napoleon fan boy) so we have something else to talk derogatory to them sprouts about, bad for them good for us.
A Nosey fan boy.

Off course it is a pity that the farm was demolished, but it was already in a derelict state for a long time. More importantly, it had seen many changes since the 1815 campaign, so there was not that much original about it in the first place. That being said it would have been nice if a typical farmbuilding remaind at the crossroads, original or not.

The Belgians have no interest in preserving relics of war (unless it brings in high spending tourists)….OK sweeping generalisation I admit and, if true, who can blame them?

If you live in the "cockpit of Europe" you probably can see nothing worth preserving in memories of foreigners devastating your land, to fight their own causes.

The trouble is, once your heritage is destroyed, all you have is architecture like that which surrounds QB these days. See it on Google Earth. It is truly ghastly. Concrete blocks, filling stations, faceless structures. Plastic signs over shabby little buildings.

They are not alone. There is hardly a farmhouse left in Ireland, all replaced by identical Bungalows, that look straight out of Mid West, small town USA (which is fine there, if built on empty land, with no history…but not where…Oh forget it.

Where can MacDonald's now stick their sign? You may well ask!

I would preserve rather than develop every time.

I think trying to intercede this late in the history of the site is a problem. As you can see the area in no way supports any kind of historical appreciation/education. If conservation had started maybe 50 years ago, then it might be a different story. I think effort and resources need to be spent where there is actually still something worthy of saving.

If you look at a broader view of Belgian conservation I think that you will find a different picture emerges. Their historic towns are, in many cases, among the best preserved/restored in western Europe and local planning laws within those communities are VERY restrictive.

Looking, for example, at Bruges, you can see the amount of work that has been done over many years and is still on-going. The investment must have been huge.

I think a lot of people, all over Europe, can support conservation where the reasoning is clear and the site of reasonably obvious historical/cultural significance. If it happens to be in a well known and visited area with many such sites it tends to be better still – which is why those areas attract the attention and the cash.

Odd buildings, now long out of the context that made them 'interesting', are difficult to justify public investment in or legal insistence on privately funded restoration/conservation.

I would concede that Quatre Bras, the crossroads, is almost an eyesore frankly. What replaces this building will not likely improve that. Also I would admit the building was not as iconic as LHS or Hgmnt, but there are so few buildings of that era left in the Belgian countryside.

Bruges will always attract investment these days, as it is a massive tourist attraction and money spinner. I still get the impression that there is that mindset "drive a motorway right across that battlefield because no one lives on it and that will be cheaper"

Deadhead

Would you prefer to drive the motorway through a town or city and displace thousands of people from homes and businesses ?

People need to get a sensible perspective on conservation vs development. Having a bias to either direction is NOT the way to go, you need to look at each case separately.

At present Britain's planning laws allow interest groups to delay development in the hope that developers will give up due to the expense rather than having reasoned objections. It also allows developers to lie and cheat by changing their plans without consultation to increase profits in the knowledge that the penalties will be small.

Both are wrong but, while politics continues to play a massive part (and I mean politics, not democracy), I can't see any way forward that will improve the situation.

I confess that the preservation of the field of Waterloo matters more to me personally than that of the Great Crested Newt. But I do know that both matter to posterity………

I do feel the bias should be towards what we are leaving behind for future generations.

Speaking as a member of the heritage industry I would say it is quite a progressive profession these days.

The truth is that old farm buildings are simply no longer fit for agriculture usage any more, they're too small for tractors to enter and not designed for modern food production requirements. I can't speak for Belgium but as a signatory to the Valleta Treaty it can't be much different to the UK. Sympathetic restoration or change of use of historical buildings is encouraged, especially if a building is no longer in use or derelict or cannot be used for its original purpose. Heritage laws (listed buildings are subject to legal protection) are designed to prevent developers from destroying old or interesting buildings without permission and are I believe a valuable tool in protecting our collective built heritage. And yes, sometimes the requirements and recommendations are nonsensical and infuriating (especially if you own a listed building) but they do do a great deal to protect us from frequently quite ghastly proposed developments.

Incidentally it amuses me how often developers working in historically significant parts of the country complain about the need for heritage work, when the finished value and desirability of their development is so often massively enhanced by that historical significance.

If you look at a broader view of Belgian conservation I think that you will find a different picture emerges. Their historic towns are, in many cases, among the best preserved/restored in western Europe and local planning laws within those communities are VERY restrictive.

I would beg to differ. The real reason why Bruges retained its "historical" aspect is that it was a small out of the way provincial town that wasn't worth tearing down to replace with something new.

Take Antwerp, the historical centre is long gone. The ancient core of the city vanished in the 1850's when they straightened the quays of the Scheldt river. The old waterways that made Antwerp look like a cooler version of Amsterdam, Delft or Leiden were simply vaulted over. The tiny historical bit that did escape destruction was bulldozed in the late 1960's to make way for a social housing project which replaced the old town with "visually compatible" 70's style brutalist houses of brick and concrete.

If you go check the Market square, you'll find nice guildhall buildings with their shining gold statuary and expensive facades. But if you look at mid-19th century photos you'll notice the same buildings, just not as fancy looking, because all the nice bits and details were added in the late 19th and early 20th century to jazz up things a bit.

And the list of classic buildings that were demolished and replaced by modern architecture is very long, many of which commonly feature in worst architecture lists like the Tolhuis building or the Antwerp Tower.

Ditto for the Grand Place in Brussels, which was completely ruined in the 17th century and rebuilt several times since. And if we talk about Brussels as a whole, entire quarters of the city were demolished and replaced by modern office buildings because both government and local authorities were bought and sold on the idea of a bright new modern city, the result is that a large swathe of the city is a no go zone at night where the only ones you see are either people working late, security or maintenance personnel.

There has been a slight change since then, but unlike many other countries where urban planning is a serious matter left to specialists who advise politicians, in Belgium it's the other way round, where politicians dictate urbanists what they need to do.

One side-effect is that unlike places where new areas are planned as a whole, there is a huge freedom in how a house can be built, there are places in Belgium which are pearls filled with things like Art Nouveau or Art Deco treasures and amazing looking projects, but there is also a price to pay because the odds are that right next to your Art Nouveau palace someone thought it would be a great idea to put down the ugliest, most soulless and generic cookie-cutter modern development right next to it.

That's how Belgium works !

John and/or Winston,

I never said that Brooklyn should not have been developed. You are the one that brought up Brooklyn. I am just saying we need to preserve as much as we can. Don't bring up a bunch of silly false equivalencies. There are plenty of examples of battle sites which are impossible to do anything about. But we need to preserve what we can.

You have the huge advantage in USA that you want to preserve what you do have, but have vast tracts of land to work with.

Funny thing. Three hundred years from now your heritage will show the difference I'd guess. We do not have that many Florences or Dubrovniks or Bruges or Toledos in Europe still left. What we have is disappearing, unless commercially massive! Our heritage is disappearing so fast.

I always remember 1983 six months in Ann Arbor, MI. We went to somewhere called Dearborn Park where a really enthusiastic guide took us around buildings transported from Europe and reconstructed. She showed us a cottage from "your Cotswolds" which was 150 years old "How cool is that?" she asked.

We stood there thinking our house had another century back on that, back home. But she was so proud, she was part of a society that knew what they had there, we absolutely loved her and said nowt….nowt!

So funny that the "Colonies Still in Rebellion against the Monarchy" can yet teach us about preserving our culture over here. You can.

My country is destroyed, nearer to you. Very little left of old Ireland. Golf courses, smart hotels and empty building sites, destroyed by the last financial crisis.

Idiots,

This may be rank heresy but I can see both sides. This is Belgium and there's probably history attached to every square foot if you want to make the point. If you were going to stretch the point you probably could make a case for preserving everything. When I was last in Europe I stayed at a hotel which had a rathskeller in a basement with a roman foundation, a Gothic first floor and a 16the century second floor. The Third and fourth were 18th century but had been badly damaged in he war (18th century Turks). So what history becomes the problem.

This can reach madness as an example the "preservationists" tend to go a little potty. Just down the road from me was an old hotel called "San Francisco" which used to be "Louis Lake House." It was a vacation hotel for people who came to Swartswood lake in the 30's and 40's for holiday. Well the thing was empty for years and they wanted to tear it down. The preservationists got their hooks into it and wanted to save it. I asked them why? No one famous lived there, died there, slept there, fought there, signed anything there or did anything there." The Answer was that "Oh it's a good example of the type of architecture of hotels of the 30's and 40's that people used to go to."

It was, in fact, a quite ordinary building. Next they'll be thinking of preserving New York city crack houses as a representative of the type.

For my own, I surely think the farmhouse could have been saved, but I'm not there.

One thing that is happening in America is that developers are getting savvy and incorporation historic landmarks into their design when they can.

But ther's another side that's sad. You can travel all up and down the east coast of America and find dozes of small little historic places the locals have turned into museams. There's the Mr. This or that house or the Flapdoodle Mansion all of them are exquisite gems of local color and commemorating some great or not so great figure. I go to all of these wherever I go, and they are wonderful and better than a lot of the bigger museusms, but the sad thing is very few are like me. Most people just pass these little gems by and the curators and attendents spend most of their day in boredom and no one cares. Sad tis.

Now Ottoathome has summarised it better than any of us can. But Patrick R et al have also made some valuable points…

There is no right answer. I worked in a hospital here in The Boro called the North Riding Infirmary (Middlesbrough) for nearly 20 years. It was a hundred years old and in a shocking state. We performed major complex operations, but had to transfer patients after surgery in an ambulance to get to an ITU! The building was unrecognisable compared to images of its opening over 100 years ago, as extensions appeared. It was falling to pieces. There seriously were holes in the walls and plaster ceiling that collapsed due to rain ingress (thank God at night)

But everyone in The Boro loved it. It was a landmark. My wife and I watched two dozers demolish it into a pile of bricks, in 15 minutes. I had thought a few weeks work. No, not once the internal beams were gone.

What has replaced it is horrific and vacant, as Boro, edge of town centre, is not exactly prime real estate.

They probably are no worse than we are in UK, those in Belgium…but allow me my prejudices!

and I am so glad I have kept an EU passport, from the Land of Saints and Scholars

It wouldn't be Belgium if you had a perfect example land on your lap right in the middle of a discussion.

Now I want to say first of all that conservation is a modern concept. In the past whenever a building needed to replaced, altered to added to, you'd simply incorporate whatever style was prevalent at the time. A perfect example is the Blois castle in France. It's a medieval castle that has been modified with Renaissance elements and has a Baroque wing added later on. If you're not up on your architecture, you'll notice some elements are different, but to most people it looks "old" and nothing really stands out because while styles vary, it's still similar enough.

Now there is a late 19th century fire station in the Port of Antwerp that has been converted into the new Port Authority building.

As you can see it's a big modern design right on top of a classical looking building (which itself is a Neo-Renaissance style replica of an older Hanseatic league building that burned down in the earlier 19th century.)

It's controversial because people don't like something modern being rammed into something old, but this is a very ancient practice, the major difference being that modern buildings are often highly distinctive from older styles architecture, so while it has been done many times in the past it's not really noticeable since it all kinda fits together. These modern addtions usually stand out as a sore thumb.

Now a renowned architect, bOb Van Reeth (as you can tell by the ostentatious disregard for the rules of capitalisation, somebody desperate to be seen as "creative") essentially told everyone to shut their filthy yap and accept this is awesome architecture, because the "perfect union of modern and classic" is beyond perfection.

Today, there was an article that one of the buildings he designed (A brutalist shop made of mostly concrete elements, including the furniture) has been sold by the original owner and someone suggested tearing part of it down to make it more modern, the "perfect union of a 40-year old classic modern design and cutting edge contemporary modern architecture"

"This is a crime akin to carving into my flesh !!!" bOb Van Reeth responded. "It's murder, it's a crime against art, how dare they change something that was perfect in the first place and specifically designed to be its own entity which would never require an alteration …"

I couldn't help but notice more than a passing hint of hypocrisy … According to bOb, it's fine to add some bit of modern architecture to a classic building, which is essentially "the flight forward" because he and his kind would rather set themselves on fire than compromise their awesome vision of creating nothing less than cutting-edge modern architecture. But when someone has the same aspiration to do so with their work, suddenly it's a crime !

Alien spaceship lands in Antwerp, alien crew will visit CRISIS wargames convention on november 5th.

We should just be grateful we still have Mt St Jean I guess. I guess it is for the Belgians to decide their own priorities.

One farmhouse could not have occupied all that much space, so would it really have been such an obstacle to "development"?

If the political will had been there, couldn't it have been expropriated and restored?

BREXIT

It's controversial because people don't like something modern being rammed into something old, but this is a very ancient practice, the major difference being that modern buildings are often highly distinctive from older styles architecture, so while it has been done many times in the past it's not really noticeable since it all kinda fits together. These modern additions usually stand out as a sore thumb.

The Williamite/Late Stuart additions to Hampton Court are a case in point. However, they are a newer wing on an existing building using the "next stage" in a continuous theme of gradual architectural development and using the same materials, which are seldom ever seen in the same view, not waiting two hundred years and then sticking something completely different in style and using completely different materials, right on top of it.

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