ARCADES PROJECT

The original Passage Lemonnier in Liege was built in the 1830s, making it almost 10 years older than its neighbours in Brussels. But this arcade in Liege was completely rebuilt in Art Deco style 100 years later, so the passage today has more of a 1930s feel.

RAF bombing in May 1940, followed by 1960s changes to the glass ceiling leave a very different arcade from the one the citizens of this city in eastern Belgium would have known a century ago.

It’s a beautiful arcade, though, and is still going through a restoration period bringing back as many of the Art Deco features as possible.

The shops today cover a massive range, from the marzipan shop which has been in the same family’s hands for generations, or the drapers, which is sadly about to close after more than 140 years, to the more modern home design shops, boutiques and jewellers common to many arcades around the world. There were about 10 vacant premises at the time of my visit in March 2024, but even these empty shops looked attractive, many with stylish spiral staircases and all with the same classic door handles, which are a distinguishing feature of the Liege arcade.

Highlights of the arcade include the beautiful mosaic dome in the middle (which was a glass ceiling until the 1960s), the 19^th century mural painted on the wall of what is now a burger bar, but was for many years the Renaissance Restaurant, or the golden statues, two of which stand up high in the central section (and three others remain in storage pending further renovations).

The only visible section of this arcade which still remains from the original 1830s building are the upper floors (now flats) in the facade of the entrance on rue de l’universite. But look inside most of the shops for a superb range of spiral staircases which reminded me of the Royal Opera Arcade in London, and in one shop they have a glass protection over the stairs down into the cellar which lies under each shop still today.

Great pains have been made to preserve details like the original wooden pillars holding up much of the structure, the lighting above each shop front and even the air vents at floor level. There’s a real sense of community to this arcade and at least half the shops had for sale on their shelves the beautiful book of the arcade’s history going back 175 years.

My pick of the arcade’s past

Belgium’s oldest surviving arcade was built between 1836 and 1838. The two architects who designed it tossed a coin to see whose name should be given to the arcade, and Mr Lemonnier won, so we might have had a Passage Beaulieu instead, which would have been no bad thing either really.

Early tenants were extremely varied: from an arms manufacturer selling rifles, Scottish pistols and other ‘luxury’ arms at No 55, to wallpaper at No 56, corsets at No 42 and a tailor at No 52. A hairdresser opposite the Renaissance restaurant in the arcade also sold wigs, men’s grooming equipment and shirts and collars.

There were food riots in Liege in 1847, and one evening a crowd raced through the Passage Lemonnier, smashing shop windows and breaking the glass of the lamps lighting the arcade. (Illustrated London News, 13 March 1847, www.britishnewsapaperarchive.co.uk)

The Renaissance was the social hub of the arcade from the outset. Its murals and its furnishings, as well as its spiral staircase leading up to a massive billiard room drew acclaim from local press at the time. It had potentially the world’s first smoking ban (on the ground floor at least) in 1840 already, with a view to preserving the murals and to attracting more ladies to the cafe. It switched from being a cafe to a brasserie, which became famous for its steamy choucroute; it had new names, and even for a time became a perfume shop. It is now a burger bar, but the interior is still impressive.

Georges Simenon was a regular at the Renaissance as a child, and the poet Verlaine had an ignominious drunken binge on absinthe in the Renaissance.

One entrance to the arcade was destroyed by an RAF bomb which hit Liege in May 1940 as the Germans advanced through Belgium.

This arcade in films or books

Surely a Georges Simenon novel has scenes in Passage Lemonnier. Many of them are set in Liege, but I haven’t read Simenon since I was a teenager learning French. Can anyone suggest one?

Most of my history picks came from the magnificent book ‘175 Years in the Passage Lemonnier’ – on sale in many of the arcade shops. The book also speaks of some of the arcade characters, like Desire, the newspaper seller, who only stopped when he passed away at age 85 in 1915; or Vera, who sat in her chair in the arcade selling lottery tickets from the end of the Second World War until 1980.

What memories do you have of visits in years gone by?

Have you got any good stories to add on the past of this arcade?

What’s your favourite shop in the arcade today?

My favourite shop in the arcade

This has to be the marzipan shop, a unique business I have never seen anywhere else. Watch the skilled bakers at work with their decades old moulds to shape the marzipan before your eyes. Limits on my luggage meant I could only a small marzipan mouse and a bag of small marzipan balls to keep me going on my Belgian trip.

Is there a website for this arcade?

Yes, there is, and this is one of the best websites I have seen for an arcade, its history and its businesses today. Here is the link to the website homepage.