Deurne has 85,283 inhabitants, counted on 1 January 2025, on 13.06 square kilometres east of the city centre. That makes it the second-largest of Antwerp’s nine districts after the old town itself. It has its own airport, the city’s largest park, the home ground of the club considered the oldest in Belgian football, and a castle the province tried to sell after its museum moved out in 2014.

From farmland to district

Tradition has the Irish missionary Fredigand as abbot of an abbey called Kerkelodor here in the eighth century, and there may have been settlers in prehistoric and Roman times, but the paper trail starts in 1185. For most of its history Deurne was farmland in Antwerp’s eastern hinterland, thinly populated and crossed by the Turnhoutsebaan, the old road from Antwerp to Turnhout that ran alongside the river Schijn. Urban planning began in 1913. The population went from 15,432 in 1920 to 52,303 in 1935, more than three times as many in fifteen years, until the V-2 bombardments of the Second World War halted the growth.

Deurne remained a municipality in its own right until 1 January 1983, when it was absorbed into Greater Antwerp as one of nine districts. When the city decentralised in 2001, it got back an elected district council, led by a district chairman rather than a mayor. The film director Erik Van Looy, the musician An Pierlé, the cyclist Björn Leukemans, the Confetti’s singer Peter Renkens and Raymond Van Dijck, who pole-vaulted at the 1960 Olympics, all come from here.

An airport from a railway carriage

Work on Antwerp’s airport, about five kilometres south of the centre, in Deurne, began in 1921. Sabena started passenger flights in 1924, from an old railway carriage that served as the terminal; the first stone of a proper building was laid in 1929. In the Second World War the Luftwaffe used the field and the Erla aircraft factory next to it, and after the German retreat in 1944 the Allies flew from it briefly as Advanced Landing Ground B-70.

It is still small. There is one asphalt runway of 1,510 metres and a grass strip of 600, one terminal with a bar, ten stands and no jet bridges, so passengers walk to the plane. In 2025 it handled 240,541 passengers. TUI fly Belgium flies to Alicante, Málaga and Tenerife South, with Palma de Mallorca in season, and Sky Alps to Bolzano.

The Rivierenhof and the castle for sale

The Rivierenhof, the largest park in Antwerp, exists because the Province of Antwerp bought the Ter Rivieren estate in 1921 to turn it into a public park. The estate came with a castle. Sterckshof started as a moated farmhouse, the Hooftvunder, recorded from at least the 13th century; in 1523 Gerard Sterck bought it, built a castle with towers and turrets and gave it his name. It was neglected after 1664, passed to the Jesuits of Lier in 1693, was sold to Jan Baptist Cogels in 1776 and was a ruin by the 1880s. What stands today is a reconstruction, designed from 1922 and built in the 1930s from old pictures and archaeological finds. In 1938 the castle passed to a museum association; when that was wound up after the death of Joseph De Beer in February 1953, the province took it over.

From 1994 to 2014 the castle housed the Sterckshof silver museum. Then the silver went to the city centre, merged with the Diamond Museum into the new DIVA, and the province put the castle on the market at €4.5 million. In 2017 the Flemish government approved €2 million in subsidies towards its renovation; by August 2019 no buyer had been found. The first version of this article sent readers to the silver museum, nine years after it had closed, and to sculptures by Rodin and Henry Moore in the park, which no source we could find places there.

Selling Sterckshof is the wrong way to treat it: the province bought the estate in 1921 precisely so that it would belong to the public, and a castle rebuilt with public effort in the 1930s deserves a public use, not just a buyer.

Red and white on the Bosuil

Then there is football. Royal Antwerp FC, registration number one in Belgian football, has played at the Bosuil on the Oude Bosuilbaan since the stadium opened on 1 November 1923, the same decade the airport began. A new Stand 2, which opened on 7 December 2025, raised its capacity to 21,000. On match days tram 5 stops at Deurne Antwerp Stadion and Hermans, bus 19 at Bosuilplein, and visiting drivers are sent to the Gosselin site, free for any car with three people in it.

The Turnhoutsebaan, the old road along the Schijn, was there before any of it. It still goes to Turnhout.