Ypres Cloth Hall

Stand for a moment on the wide cobbles of the market square and let your eyes travel along the façade in front of you. It is a long, low wall of pale stone, pierced by row after row of pointed windows, with a tall square belfry rising from its centre. On a still day you can hear footsteps echo across the open stones, and the bells mark the hours above you. This is the Cloth Hall of Ypres. Locals call the town Ieper, its Dutch name. The building looks medieval, and in a way it is. But it also carries another, harder story.

Let us begin with the older story. In the Middle Ages, Flanders was one of the great cloth-making regions of Europe. Raw wool arrived from England, and Flemish weavers turned it into fine, densely woven cloth that sold across the continent. Ypres grew rich on this trade. The town needed a place to store, inspect, and sell its cloth, and this hall was the answer. Work on it began in the thirteenth century and continued for decades, finishing in the early fourteenth century. For its time, it was one of the largest secular buildings in Europe.

Think of it as a warehouse, a market, and a statement of pride, all under one roof. The ground floor and the upper floors held bolts of cloth. Merchants came to buy, and officials checked the quality of each piece before sale. The belfry had a practical job too. It held the town's bells, which marked the working day and sounded alarms. In Flemish towns, the belfry also stood for civic freedom. A church tower belonged to the clergy. A belfry belonged to the citizens.

That idea of civic pride is the reason this belfry is on the UNESCO World Heritage list. It is part of a group of belfries in Belgium and northern France, recognised together because they show the rise of independent merchant towns in medieval Europe. So when you look up at the tower, you are looking at a symbol that townspeople built for themselves. It was not built for a king and it was not built for a bishop. It was built for the people who made and sold the cloth.

Now, here is the first surprise for many visitors. Almost everything you see in front of you is not medieval stone. During the First World War, Ypres sat on the front line. From 1914 to 1918, the town lay inside a bulge in the Allied line known as the Ypres Salient. German artillery shelled it again and again. By the end of the war, the Cloth Hall was a jagged ruin. The belfry was a broken stump, and the long façade was reduced to a few fragments of wall.

Photographs from the war show a landscape that is hard to believe today. The square was a field of rubble. The houses around it were gone. Soldiers marched past the ruins on their way to the trenches east of town, and for many of them, the shattered Cloth Hall became the image of the war itself. British and Commonwealth troops passed through Ypres in enormous numbers. Many of them never came back along this road.

After the war, there was a real debate about what to do with these ruins. According to a widely repeated account, Winston Churchill suggested that the whole ruined town should be left as it was, as a memorial to the dead. The people of Ypres had another view. They wanted their homes and their town back. In the end, the town was rebuilt. The Cloth Hall took the longest of all. Its reconstruction was a slow, careful project, and it was only completed in the 1960s.

This gives the building its quiet double nature. The rebuilders followed the medieval design closely, so the shape and rhythm of the façade match the old hall. But look carefully at the stone and you may notice differences. Some sections look older and more weathered, while others are cleaner and more even in colour. Here and there, the surviving medieval fragments were worked into the new structure. You are looking at a medieval building and a twentieth-century act of recovery at the same time.

Today the upper floors hold the In Flanders Fields Museum, one of the most important museums of the First World War. The museum takes its name from the famous poem written by a Canadian army doctor after fighting near Ypres. Inside, the focus is on people as much as battles. You meet soldiers, nurses, refugees, and civilians from many nations. The museum also covers the use of poison gas, which German forces released on a large scale near Ypres in 1915. It was one of the first times this happened in modern war.

Here is the second surprise, and it is a lighter one. Ypres has a strange old custom connected to this belfry. In earlier centuries, cats were thrown from the tower. Explanations vary. One common story says cats were kept to control mice in the stored wool, and their numbers then had to be reduced. Another links the custom to old superstitions about cats and witchcraft. Today the town remembers this in a far gentler way. A cat festival, called the Kattenstoet, is held every few years, and only toy cats are thrown from the belfry now.

Take a slow walk along the length of the building. Along the façade you will see rows of statues set into niches. They represent historical figures connected to Flanders and the town. Below them, the arcades at street level open into passages and entrances. Cafés and shops line the edges of the square around you, and on market days the cobbles fill with stalls. The space still works as a market, just as it did seven centuries ago, only now the goods are cheese, flowers, and bread instead of cloth.

If you have time, the area around the hall rewards a short walk. Just behind it stands Saint Martin's Cathedral, which was also destroyed in the war and rebuilt. A short walk to the east takes you to the Menin Gate, a large memorial arch carved with the names of tens of thousands of soldiers with no known grave. Every evening, local buglers play the Last Post there. It is a simple ceremony, and many visitors find it the most moving moment of their time in Ypres.

Before you move on, stand back near the middle of the square and look at the whole hall once more. Notice how calm it seems in the light. The stone looks almost warm in the late afternoon sun. Children run across the cobbles, people sit with coffee, and the bells keep the hours as they always have. It is easy to forget that this square was once a field of broken stone. That calm is the real achievement here. As you walk away, listen for the bells behind you... a town that chose to rebuild, and to remember.