Forges de Clabecq

March 2022

A little over 8 years ago, I made a list^Note1 of places I would have really liked to visit.
Even today, I regret having started the urbex again much too late. Not only at the time, urbex was one of the most confidential hobbies (therefore without the pests that are found everywhere and you could really find yourself alone in the world in an abandoned place), but also abandoned sites abounded everywhere in the country.

So, in first position in this list, we can find the industrial site visited on this beautiful day in March.
Yet a highly historic place, almost nothing remains today. From the first forge built in 1752 under the auspices of Empress Maria Theresa of Hungary and Bohemia to the immense complex comprising at the end 3 blast furnaces, only the HF2 is still standing. Built in 1909, it's the last example of this type of blast furnace in Europe. Of course, the harmful politicians would have liked to throw everything away, but a few diehards are holding on and have blocked the demolition of this unique vestige since 2017.
It's precisely this last memory of the Forges de Clabecq that I absolutely wanted to immortalize. These forges symbolize the beginning of the end of heavy industry in Belgium. Yet ideally located between canals, railways and highways, the forges were sacrificed on the altar of globalization in 1997. After Clabecq, all the other blast furnaces and coking plants in the country will be closed and erased from our landscape.
Theater of violent fights between the workers and the white collars (we will remember the punitive expedition against a curator), the tool will be stopped little by little and the site will fall into lethargy from 2002. Nowadays , only the rolling mill maintains an activity.
Amusing detail : the site still belongs to a large industrial group, the same one that closed the forges.

Dismantled in several stages since 2002, the old forges today present different faces : the HF2 being demolished, vast land cleared of pollution (really?) and a construction site of modern horrors (basically, towers and cubes disgusting, as we see everywhere). The entire site must eventually be converted into a residential area. But without any trace of the past. However, without a past, there is no future.
Is the industrial past so shameful that you want to forget it ? Or is it better to erase the scars and thus forget the responsibilities of the bosses, the banks and the political world in the social bloodbath that will have been the closure of the Forges de Clabecq ? Asking the question provides a good part of the answer, doesn't it ?

The visit was made under the good guard of CCTV cameras. Did they do their job ? I don't know, I didn't stay there long enough to check.
In my haste, I forgot to go see the casting floor, where the cast iron came out of the blast furnace. When mined, this place was the most spectacular, with the lava-like melt coming out of a volcano. It's too bad...