Zuid, Antwerp
They called it Le Petit Paris. When the Spanish Citadel that had brooded over Antwerp's southern flank since the sixteenth century - the Zuidkasteel - was finally pulled down beginning in 1874, the city was left with a vast plot of cleared ground on the bank of the Scheldt and the rare chance to design a neighbourhood from nothing. The street plan, approved by Royal Decree in 1875, drew openly on the boulevards Baron Haussmann had cut through Paris a decade earlier - wide diagonal avenues, generous public squares, monumental anchor buildings. Within twenty-five years the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (1890), the Dutch Synagogue (1893), the Parein Biscuit Factory (1894), the State Commercial College (1897), St. Michael's Church (1897), and the South Station (1898) had all opened their doors. For half a century Le Petit Paris was where the Antwerp bourgeoisie wanted to live.
The First Bomb
The Second World War found the Zuid first. The first V-weapon to strike Antwerp - the German vengeance rockets that fell on the city between October 1944 and March 1945, killing thousands - hit the intersection of Schildersstraat and Leopold De Waelplaats, in the heart of the Zuid, a few hundred metres from the Royal Museum. The neighbourhood absorbed considerable damage. The bourgeois families who had made the Zuid fashionable for two generations began to move out, and the post-war period brought a long decline. The Southern Docks fell out of use. The South Station was shut down and demolished in 1965. In 1968 and 1969 the docks themselves were filled in and the land repurposed as a parking lot. In 1972 the old Hippodrome came down. The neighbourhood was reduced to what one history of the period called 'a district noted only for its residual charm.'
Anny De Decker and the Wide White Space
What revived the Zuid was, oddly, its affordability. Cheap rents drew immigrants and bohemians into the empty bourgeois apartments. In 1966 a gallerist named Anny De Decker took the ground floor of an architecturally eccentric building on the corner of Schildersstraat and Plaatsnijdersstraat - locally nicknamed Het Bootje, 'the little boat' - and opened the Wide White Space Gallery. Over the next decade Wide White Space showed Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Carl Andre, Bruce Nauman, Daniel Buren and James Lee Byars to Antwerp audiences before most European cities had heard of them. The gallery closed in 1976, but its presence had announced something about the Zuid that the city would take another decade to act on. The International Rubens Year in 1977 brought tens of thousands of visitors to Antwerp's south side; the slow climb back began.
Three Museums, Two Art Centres
Today the Zuid carries the densest cluster of museum and gallery space in Belgium outside Brussels. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp - the KMSKA - reopened in 2022 after eleven years of refurbishment and still anchors the district visually and culturally. The Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, the contemporary art museum first laid out by architect Michel Grandsard and extended by him in 1997, is one of the largest of its kind in the country and had Bart de Baere as its director from 2002 until his resignation in 2025. The Fotomuseum, opened in 2004, holds a deep historical and contemporary photographic collection and publishes its own quarterly journal, FMM. The Zuiderpershuis - a former hydraulic power station - has hosted the theatre company De Internationale Nieuwe Scene since 1987. De Monty, originally a parish-hall cinema, is now a touring venue for dance and physical theatre.
Rubens at the Water Gate
The most peculiar monument in the Zuid is one most visitors miss. The Waterpoort - the Water Gate - on Sint-Gillisplaats was built in 1624 as the Porta Regia, a ceremonial water gate on the Scheldt honouring the Spanish King Philip IV. Its abundant Baroque decoration has long been attributed to Peter Paul Rubens, though historians note there is no documentary proof of his direct involvement. To see it in afternoon light is to see the Baroque confidence that Antwerp's great painters brought to every medium. In 2012 a new statue of William of Orange (William the Silent) and Marnix of Sint-Aldegondis went up in the gardens of the Royal Museum, surrounded by stelae commemorating the key conflicts that led to the Thirty Years' War - a monument that stands on or close to where both men once defended their stronghold against Spanish forces.
Justice in Glass and Steel
The Palace of Justice on the site of the old South Station may be the Zuid's biggest architectural gamble. Designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership (the same firm behind the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd's building in London) in association with VKStudio and Ove Arup & Partners, the building opened in 2007 and stands as a fan of pointed white-glass roofs that looks, on a misty morning, like a flotilla of triangular sails coming up the Scheldt. The complex brought lawyers, paralegals, and a service economy back into a district that had been hollow for decades. To the south, on the derelict marshalling yards along the neighbourhood's edge, the Circulair Zuid project is building 2,200 sustainable homes between 2018 and 2030 - the latest reinvention of land that has been demolished, abandoned, rebuilt, and demolished again, repeatedly, since the Spanish first put up their citadel four centuries ago.
From the Air
The Zuid sits on the east bank of the Scheldt at approximately 51.21°N, 4.395°E, just south of central Antwerp. From the air the district is recognisable by the white-roofed fan of the Palace of Justice at its southern edge, the dark mass of the KMSKA at its centre, and the long open spine of the former Southern Docks. Antwerp International (EBAW) is 7 km south-east; Brussels (EBBR) 45 km south. The Scheldt's broad south-pointing curve here makes the Zuid easy to identify on approach. Best at 1,500-3,000 ft.