Results for “derek blyth”

Ostend is different. Other resorts along Belgium’s North Sea coastline are small, touristy places. But Ostend is a real city.

Derek Blyth visits the Sahara of the North.

Derek Blyth points out a unique Belgian phenomenon, the trade in paper beach flowers.

Derek Blyth expresses his love for the carillons of Flanders and the Netherlands.

The comic strip started in daily newspapers as a funny story at the back of the page. But is has evolved in the Netherlands and Belgium into a subtle and subversive art form. The Fleming Ever Meulen loves cars, houses and women. His illust...

The plan was to drive from Ghent to Kortrijk on the old Kortrijksesteenweg. Houses in various eclectic styles, hypermarkets, car showrooms, roadside brothels, bars and forgotten hotels, churches and a statue of a caribou perced on a rock. ...

The author sets off on the longest tram ride in the world, all the way along the Belgian coast from De Panne to Knokke: 67 kilometers, 68 stops. A strip of fantasies. Now and then he gets out of the vehicle to glance at a nudist beach, a f...

Derek Blyth goes on a literary pilgrimage in Willem Elsschot’s Antwerp.

Derek Blyth ends up in a deserted village that refuses to die.

Derek Blyth hits the road in a very Dutch phenomenon, the caravan.

Did you know there is a Dutch town called Austerlitz with a pyramid nearby, built by Napoleon’s soldiers?

It's early morning in Mechelen and the streets are empty. Derek Blyth is looking forward to wandering down the cobbled lanes, looking inside gothic churches, passing some time in the municipal museum, and ending up, as everyone does, in one...

In Hasselt there's no big square, no great art collection, none of the sense of ancient history you feel in nearby towns like Tongeren or Maastricht. Yet it's somehow quietly appealing. At the end of his day in Hasselt, Derek Blyth took a f...

When I visited Middelburg for the first time, back in the early 1980s, the town was an old-fashioned, religious place. It was a Sunday and everything was closed, except for the churches, which were full. It felt twenty years behind Amsterd...

Many Brontë experts have described Charlotte’s impressions of Belgium, but few have considered what the Belgians thought of Charlotte. The Brussels-based writer and translator Helen Mac-Ewan now fills this gap with her second carefully res...

Beer drinking in Flanders goes back a long way. The rich heritage of Flemish beer used to be a well-kept secret, but the efforts of café owners and writers have helped to promote the image of Flemish ales. As word gets around, the names of ...

Back in the 1880s, when Van Gogh was plodding through the Brabant potato fields, Eindhoven was just a small Catholic town. Now it is the fifth largest city in the Netherlands, with an acclaimed modern art museum and a world-class design ac...

In December 1516, thanks to help from Erasmus, the first edition of Thomas More’s Utopia came off Dirk Martens’ presses in the university town of Leuven. Originally published in Latin, the fable begins in Antwerp, where More bumps into Gil...

You can find them in the Old Hack drinking De Koninck or Leffe, the foreign correspondents covering the European Union in Brussels. They have little inclination to seek out stories outside the European “bubble”. But the Brussels press corps...

Utrecht seemed in 1979 like Utopia compared to the crumbling island monarchy the author had left behind. He was living in Maastricht when Thatcher went to war with Argentina. After Amsterdam he finally landed in Brussels. Sometimes Belgium ...

Some people have gone to France or Italy in search of passionate romance, but others have fallen hopelessly in love in the unpromising dampness of the Low Countries. The stories of James Boswell and Belle van Zuylen, Charlotte Brontë and he...

To the author, it is impossible to imagine living in the Low Countries without talking Dutch. Deprived of the Dutch teaching he had as a native speaker of English, he would remain baffled by Dutch street names, like Beenhouwersstraat, Hands...

When the author of this piece decided to drive from Brussels to Antwerp on the old N1 road, it was partly an attempt to discover the other Flanders, the space between the cities. He imagined that the whole journey would take a day at most. ...

Review of Derek Blyth's 'Flemish Cities Explored. Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Mechelen, Brussels & Louvain' (London, 1996)

British journalist Derek Blyth travels through the Low Countries and stops in cities that are worth visiting. Each time he looks at the place and its inhabitants through curious glasses.