Ronny Van de Velde, the compiler of Antwerpen, verloren stad (‘Antwerp, Lost City’), takes a walk through a city that no longer exists. He uses breath-taking archive material to show us how Antwerp was just before it underwent a spectacular transformation. The sleepy community by the river must and would be freed of anything and everything standing in the way of economic growth: the Scheldt Quays were straightened and the ancient walls demolished: the modern city could never have made it in through the medieval city gates.
This book is first and foremost an aesthetic experience, with images from a time when photography was just beginning to emerge as an art form. The spectacular series of pictures by Edmond Fierlants, supplemented by images by other professional and amateur photographers, offers a unique insight into a city that was lost. Or, as a journalist put it at the end of his article on Fierlants’ photographic expedition in 1860: ‘The old buildings have now been saved; not from demolition, perhaps, but from being forgotten.’