Grand Hornu
Le Grand-Hornu
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The workers' town had 425 houses, each with its own bread oven, water supply and garden, and about 2,500 people already lived there by 1829.
- Rent was one day's wages a week, deducted from the miner's pay, and the town had a compulsory school for children under twelve.
- The houses were originally painted yellow above a black base; only one house, on rue de Gorge, still keeps these colours.
- The horse-drawn railway that sparked the 1830 riot was only 1,800 metres long, yet it cut the horses needed from 150 to 25.
- Twelve shafts were sunk around the town, most named after saints matching the names of the owners' wives and daughters; the deepest reached 998 metres.
- De Gorge's own château was finished in 1832, after his death, and never lived in; it hosted King Leopold I in 1832 and 1854.
- By De Gorge's death the concession produced about 120,000 tonnes of coal a year and employed nearly 1,500 people.
- A statue of De Gorge was raised in the courtyard in 1854, and in 1927 a crypt was built there for his tomb and some twenty family members.
- Bruno Renard is thought to have studied Ledoux's 1804 book on the ideal city of the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans.
- The engineers' building that houses the MAC's museum was restored by the Belgian architect Pierre Hebbelinck.
Why it is worth it
Grand-Hornu is a coal mine that looks like a Neoclassical palace. Between about 1816 and 1831, the Lille businessman Henri De Gorge, who had bought a struggling colliery concession in the Borinage in 1810, built not only workshops and engine halls but a model workers' town around them, meant to attract and hold miners in a region where labour moved constantly. It became one of the earliest planned workers' settlements anywhere, and in 2012 it was inscribed by UNESCO with three other collieries as the Major Mining Sites of Wallonia.
The plan was begun by the Lille architect François Obin and taken over after his death in 1825 by Bruno Renard of Tournai, a pupil of Percier and Fontaine. Its heart is a great oval courtyard, entered through a portico from a square court, and around the industrial core stretched rows of workers' houses, which were later sold, mostly to the families living in them. The complex was barely finished when, in October 1830, carters who had lost their livelihood to De Gorge's new horse-drawn railway joined the revolutionary unrest of that year and sacked his house and installations. De Gorge died of cholera in 1832.
Mining ended in 1954 and the industrial buildings were left to decay; a royal decree even condemned them to demolition in 1969. A local architect, Henri Guchez, bought the site in 1971 and began restoring it, and the province of Hainaut later took it over as a cultural centre. Since 2002 the former engineers' building has housed the MAC's, the contemporary art museum of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, and exhibitions of design and applied arts run in the old industrial buildings.
Getting there
Grand-Hornu is in Hornu, part of Boussu, about 2 km from Saint-Ghislain and roughly 10 km west of central Mons. Brussels South Charleroi Airport (CRL) is about 44 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Historic Boat Lifts of the Canal du Centre, La Louvière 18.6 km · boat-lift
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Grand-Hornu is an old industrial coal mining complex and company town in Hornu (Boussu), near Mons, in Belgium. It was built by Henri De Gorge between 1810 and 1830. It is a unique example of functional town-planning. Today it is owned by the province of Hainaut, which houses temporary exhibitions in the buildings. It is one of the four industrial sites which were listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2012.
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