The oldest things in Antwerp’s city archive are two charters from 1221. They were kept for centuries in a chest called the privilegiekom, and the chest now stands in the reading room on the top floor of the Sint-Felixpakhuis, a warehouse of 1858 on the Oudeleeuwenrui, on the Eilandje. Since 2006 the archive has been named after the building: FelixArchief. It holds more than 30 kilometres of paper, more than 100 terabytes of digital records and an image bank of more than 252,000 photographs, slides and prints.

Most of that is the ordinary business of a city: council records, building permits, tax rolls, the files of the city and its welfare services, the records of the port authority and the police. That is exactly what makes it useful. Its readers come for house histories, family trees and the stories of buildings that no longer stand, as their own favourite finds show.

A warehouse for coffee and hops

The Compagnie générale de matériels de chemins de fer, a railway equipment company from Molenbeek, built the Entrepôt Saint-Félix in 1858 to a design by the architect Felix Pauwels. It stored bulk goods for the port: coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, hops, grain, cheese and wine. Three years after it opened, in 1861, it burned down. It was rebuilt at once from what could be saved, cast-iron columns included, with six floors instead of seven and a new glass-roofed passage through the middle, about 77 metres long and more than six metres wide, between the Oudeleeuwenrui and the Godefriduskaai. The passage was a fire escape and a loading street. The two wings on either side offer 22,405 square metres of storage.

The warehouse worked until 1975. The city bought the empty building, and it was listed as a protected monument in 1976. Then it stood empty for more than twenty years.

From the town hall to the docks

The archive had moved around even more. Before the French Revolution each city department kept its own papers; the first city archivist was appointed only in 1796. Until the first half of the twentieth century the archives stayed in the town hall on the Grote Markt. During the Second World War the most important pieces were taken south to a moated castle near Rochefort. After the war the archive went to a building on the Venusstraat that had never been designed for it, refurbished in December 1956, and stayed there for almost fifty years. It closed to the public on 1 May 2006.

The city chose the Felixpakhuis in 1998 and gave the conversion to Robbrecht en Daem, the Ghent practice of Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem. Work started in 2002 and cost more than €25 million. The solution is a building inside a building. On the upper six floors, concrete containers built inside the old walls hold the documents; the original containers held almost 34 kilometres of shelving, since extended to more than 38. On the top floor a new self-supporting roof of oak covers the reading and study rooms, arranged around three light wells. The archive reopened there in 2006, and since 2010 it has kept a second depot, with almost six kilometres of space, in the city’s Den Bell administrative centre.

The ground floor went the other way. Robbrecht en Daem delivered it as shells for shops, cafés and restaurants, and the central passage is now a public shortcut between the two streets. That is the best decision in the project: an archive is the most closed of public buildings, and this one turned its ground floor into a street anyone can walk through. Nobody needs a reservation to see the cast-iron columns.

What the reading room holds

The holdings fall into three parts: the archive of the ancien régime, from the Middle Ages to 1794 and 1795; the modern archive since then; and private archives of people, families, companies and associations, among them the Antwerp Jewish historical archive collected by Sylvain Brachfeld. The move paid off quickly. In 2005, the last year on the Venusstraat, 1,224 different people used the reading room; in 2015 there were 4,345. Requests for digitised records rose from 3,642 in 2010 to 57,020 in 2015, after the digital repository went online.

For its tenth anniversary in 2016 the archive published a booklet of twelve documents discovered in the reading room, each presented by an “ambassador”, and the selection says a lot about what such a place is for. One is the building file of 1905 for Waterloostraat 49 in Zurenborg, by the architect Joseph Baeckelmans, who was executed by a German court in 1915. Another is a drawing of a great vaulted cellar found and destroyed when the Wisselstraat was widened in 1877; only the drawing and one column survive. A third records the Gulden Bot, a sixteenth-century corner house at Hoogstraat 39 whose first stone was laid on 2 March 1539 and which was pulled down around 1936. And there is a xenophobic pamphlet of July 1881 against the city’s German residents and the naturalisation law, by the politicians Eduard Coremans and Victor Jacobs. An archive keeps the embarrassing papers too.

It also keeps the painful ones. In August 2025 the Antwerp police handed over a list drawn up after the liberation of 4 September 1944 by the sixth police district, which covered the area from the station quarter to the city park. It records people deported during the war, with their names, addresses and dates of deportation, and it now sits with the police archive the FelixArchief already held. “This list is no ordinary document,” said Els van Doesburg, then acting mayor.

On the Eilandje

The building has company. The archive of the port authority is in the building too, a fitting tenant a few hundred metres from the MAS, the city’s museum on the river; for the port as it works today, see our guide to the port of Antwerp and its waterways. On the twentieth Museumnacht, on 1 August 2026, the archive showed documents from its stores, screened silent black-and-white films of Antwerp and put on the swing-jazz band Cream Coloured Pony’s, with material on the city in the Second World War alongside the MAS.

For anyone who comes to read, the rules are simple. Reserve the documents online, through the inventory numbers in the catalogue, and they will be waiting on the day; on the spot, requests are taken until 15:30 and take about half an hour to arrive, up to fifteen inventory numbers a day. The FelixArchief’s own website has the catalogue, the reservation system and the reading room hours.

The building was put up to store coffee and tobacco. It now stores the city.