In 1531 Antwerp’s merchants moved into a building made for nothing but trade: a courtyard surrounded by galleries, designed by Domien de Waghemakere in late Brabantine Gothic, off a side street of the Meir. It is generally counted as the first purpose-built commodity exchange in the world. “The Antwerp Handelsbeurs is the mother of all exchange buildings in the world,” the city guide Tanguy Ottomer told VRT in February 2026. The building that stands there now is the third on the site, it was empty for most of two decades, and since October 2019 it has been open again, as a hall for hire with a public passage through the middle.

Trade had a home in Antwerp before it had a building. In 1485 the city’s merchants received permission for a gemeyne borze, a common exchange, a first step towards a building of their own. The 1531 courtyard gave them a roof over the galleries, a fixed address and a timetable, and it made Antwerp’s way of doing business portable.

The model for London

The best proof of the building’s influence stands in the City of London. Thomas Gresham, the English crown’s agent in Antwerp, started a London exchange on the Antwerp model in 1565, built by the architect Hendrik van Paesschen. After a visit on 23 January 1570, Elizabeth I renamed it the Royal Exchange. The gallery plan travelled further, to Rotterdam, Lille and Amsterdam, whose exchange opened in 1611. By then Antwerp had lost its lead to Amsterdam, after the siege of 1584 and 1585, and the northern city inherited the trade along with the type of building it was done in.

The Antwerp building kept changing jobs. A fire destroyed it in 1583, and it was rebuilt to the same plan. It served as a commodity exchange until 1661, then for a century and a half as a drawing academy and the seat of the Guild of Saint Luke, the painters’ guild, until 1810. In 1853 Charles Marcellis covered the courtyard with a dome of glass and steel. Five years later, on 2 August 1858, the building burned down again.

Schadde’s exchange

The city held two design competitions for a replacement, and both came with a condition: keep the original concept. The winner, Joseph Schadde, delivered in 1872 the building that stands today, neo-Gothic galleries in stone around a hall carried by a metal structure, with a glass roof on wrought iron decorated with flowers and plants. The stock exchange opened the same year and stayed until 1997.

For decades the hall also doubled as the city’s party room. Ottomer counts every Belgian king among its visitors, and Winston Churchill was honoured there after the Second World War. The parties were so frequent that the city built a separate Stadsfeestzaal, a municipal festival hall, in 1908 to take some of them away.

Twenty years of pigeons

In 1997 the Antwerp stock exchange merged into the Brussels exchange, today part of Euronext, and the trading floor lost its purpose. Events kept the hall in use for a few more years. Accounts differ on when it shut for good: one architectural history gives 2001, while Ottomer links the closure to the fire that gutted the Stadsfeestzaal in 2000, after which the city closed the Handelsbeurs for fire safety. “It was a ridiculous decision by the city,” he told VRT. Whatever the date, the building then stood empty, leaking, with pigeons in the galleries, despite having been a protected monument since 1983.

Plans came and went for about fifteen years. The project restarted in October 2013 with the Marriott hotel group as a partner, the city approved a permit in October 2014, residents appealed that December, and the province confirmed the permit with changes in April 2015. Then the archaeologists found what had been under the building all along: building remains from the 12th century and urns from the Iron Age, around 800 BC.

The city handed the building in trust to Handelsbeurs Antwerpen, a company with public and private shareholders set up to restore and run the site. Stramien was the design architect, ELD Partnership the executive architect and Origin the restoration specialist. The historic columns were set on steel beams that could be adjusted in height, to protect them during the works, and a car park of three levels went in underground, with room for 293 cars and an entrance at Sint-Katelijnevest 55. The bill came to €60 million.

A hall, a restaurant and a short cut

Bart De Wever, then mayor, reopened the Handelsbeurs on 4 October 2019, and the public got in on 13 October during the Urban Walk. The ground-floor hall takes 1,600 people standing or 800 at a seated dinner; ten rooms on the first floor take 30 to 120 each, for 2,300 square metres of event space in all. The Handelsbeurs books its hall and galleries for events through its own website, and in February 2026 it hosted the third European Industry Summit, with Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and De Wever, by then prime minister, under the glass roof.

The restaurant is next door, in the Schippersbeurs, the boatmen’s exchange added in 1897 on the Lange Nieuwstraat side. It is called Fiera, it is run by J&M Catering, the venue’s caterer, and in 2025 its chef was Andy de Cremer, cooking with references to Bali, Lima and Marseille. The food comes on porcelain by Ann Demeulemeester, and the staff wear Essentiel Antwerp. Behind the hall, a passage leads to Sapphire House Antwerp, a 139-room hotel and the first in Belgium in Marriott’s Autograph Collection, built into the Hotel du Bois, a 16th-century house whose rococo façade Jan Pieter van Baurscheit the Younger designed in 1750.

The best decision in the whole project costs nothing to use. The hall was planned as a public route between the shops of the Meir and the church of Saint Charles Borromeo, open during the day, so a building that was locked for nearly twenty years now doubles as a short cut.

On weekends the ground floor opens from ten to five. The pigeons have not been readmitted.