Good to know 2 min read
Hello Belval
A guide to everything happening in Belval: what is open, what is on, and what just changed. Here is what this is, and where to start.
Here is a thing that keeps happening.
A café opens on a Tuesday. Three weeks later you are standing in a queue somewhere and a stranger mentions it, and you nod as though you knew, and you did not know. A concert sells out before it registered. Your favourite lunch place closes and something better takes over and you only find out by walking past on a Thursday afternoon.
For somewhere this small, an absurd amount goes on in Belval.
Blast furnaces next to lecture halls. A concert hall, a cinema, a station, a shopping centre, a university, a coding school with no teachers in it, and about a hundred places to eat, drink, study and lose an afternoon. All of it inside a twenty-minute walk.
So this is a guide to the lot.
Most of these places I have been to. Some I have only walked past and checked properly, and a few I am still working my way through, which is the nicest kind of homework. The cafés and the restaurants, obviously, but also the pharmacy, the station, the bike workshop tucked inside the railway station that nearly nobody knows is there. Plus everything that is on: gigs at the Rockhal, tours up into the furnaces, races, markets, the odd exhibition. And news, when something opens or closes or quietly changes.
It is not official, by the way. Not the University, not the Fonds Belval, not the Plaza, not the Commune. Just somebody who has worked here since 2015 and has been taking notes the whole time without quite meaning to.
If you would rather Belval came to you, take your pick. There is a newsletter (check the footer to register), which arrives when there is something worth sending and not otherwise. There is a WhatsApp channel, which is one-way and quiet: you see the updates, nobody sees your number, and you can leave whenever you like. And there is Instagram and LinkedIn, where most of it ends up anyway.
Have a wander through the places, or see what is on over the next few weeks.
And if I have missed somewhere you love, tell me. Please do, actually. That is rather the point.
One last thing. If you know somebody in Belval who would find this useful, send it their way. That is genuinely how something like this grows.
Welcome to Belval. Glad you are here.
