Not motoring
Belgian delights
Gavin Stamp
August, and the thoughts and aims of so many turn towards the seaside. Mine do not, for sun and sea and inactivity seem to me to be worse than a bore unless there are compensations — architecture, of course, and a means of escape to see more architecture.
The recent family holidays I recall with most affection, therefore, were those taken in that most underrated of countries, Bel- gium: paradise of great churches enhanced by the irresistible combination of chips and mayonnaise. Two years running we took a house in De Haan, an Edwardian seaside resort planned like an English garden sub- urb halfway along the Belgian coast. And of all the buildings the most attractive to me was the little neo-vernacular tram sta- tion built in 1902 from which electric trams left regularly, connecting with Ostend and so with trains on Belgium's excellent state railway system to Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and beyond ...
This tram line, which first reached De Haan in the 1880s, now runs the whole 40- mile length of the Belgian coast, from France to Holland. And it was the scene of, I think, my greatest success in organising the annual foreign jaunt of the Twentieth Century Society — in those days called the Thirties Society. It was a weekend of Not motoring delights, beginning with a hop from Southend to Ostend in that most reli- able and beautiful of British airliners, a Vickers Viscount. Then, the following day, when we emerged from the Thermae Palace Hotel, a Classical-cum-Art Deco palace which once boasted its own thermal baths, we found outside that, as promised, Westtoer, the obliging and resourceful West Flanders division of the Belgian Tourist Office, had laid on a tram for the exclusive use of our party. But this was no ordinary tram but a train of three pre-war varnished wooden cars.
In these elegant vehicles we spent the day exploring the Belgian seaside, stopping where we chose as it was out of season and the traffic was sparse. First, De Haan — or Le Coq-sur-mer as it was once known; then on through notorious Blankenberghe, Bel- gium's Southend, 'cite balneaire democra- tique par excellence' which is as vulgar and modern as De Haan is charming and old- fashioned. Next came Zeebrugge, scene of the bold Raid in 1918 to block the harbour where German submarines lurked; and
then we alighted at Knokke-Le-Zoute — Knokke-Heist as the call it now — wealth- iest and smartest of Belgian resorts, to admire the Surrealist murals by Rend Magritte and Paul Delvaux in the Casino.
Lunch was taken beyond the end of the line near the Dutch frontier in a villa built by that most unfairly maligned of Belgian monarchs, Leopold HI. Designed in 1933 in the 'style flamande' — their version of Stockbrokers' Tudor — it is now a restau- rant in the middle of a bird sanctuary. Then back on the tram to rattle and sway back to Ostend and then on and on, past the reinforced concrete remains of the Atlantic Wall through seaside towns severely damaged in both world wars to Nieuport, the once ancient fortress town at the mouth of the River Yser.
It was here that, during the Great War, the trenches and barbed wire of the West- ern Front finally reached the sea. And here, where the low-lying land crossed by the Yser and its canals were deliberately flooded to halt the German advance in 1914, is a monument to Albert, King of the Belgians, who was a symbol of his people's resistance to the invader: a grand, stripped- Classical open circular colonnade standing next to the sea and the tramlines. And nearby is a small British Memorial to the Missing which has three lions carved by that great sculptor, Charles Sargeant Jag- ger — creator of that powerful memorial to the dead of the Great Western Railway on Platform One of Paddington Station. This was a prelude to our tour the following day of the war cemeteries and memorials in Ypres Salient.
But we had not finished yet. On went the tram to La Panne and the other end of the line near the French border where, by the sea, stands a monument to commemorate the landing in 1931 of Leopold I, first King of the Belgians, to claim his kingdom. And then, after ice-creams, our tram doubled- back to my final triumph, a stop for cock- tails at the Hotel Normandie, an extraordinary manifestation of the inter- war obsession with the glamour and shapes of the ocean liner. Built in 1935, this Bel- gian Normandie has a bow and a stern and three funnels, but it is not a ship made of steel like its French namesake. Rather, it is a fantastical modern building, a painted structure of reinforced concrete moored on the sand dunes at Oostduinkerke.
To stand, drink in hand, on the prome- nade deck of this permanently beached concrete liner, gazing down across the dunes at the three almost contemporary handsome varnished wooden tramcars waiting to take us back to Ostend for mus- sels and chips and mayonnaise was, surely, a perfect end to a dream day for the non- motorist. Even so, most of these delights can still be enjoyed by anyone with the wit to explore the Belgian seaside along its strategic tramline — if in a smart modern vehicle rather than a mobile antique.
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