The Seefhoek is not on any official map of Antwerp. The name belongs to the streets of Antwerp-Noord that the city filled after it expanded in 1863, and it comes from a beer. On the corner of the Lange Beeldekensstraat and the Pesthofstraat stood a café where people drank seef, and Antwerpenaren started calling the quarter around it the Seefhoek, the seef corner. The city guide Tanguy Ottomer told VRT NWS the story in 2025.

A beer and a corner

Seef was a cloudy white beer brewed from several grains: barley and wheat, but also buckwheat and oats, and a 1916 recipe by a brewer called Verlinden adds rye and malt shoots. The beer historians at Lost Beers describe it as a countryside style, which fits the people who drank it: the Seefhoek was settled largely by families who had moved to the city from the villages, and Brasschaat, Herentals, Hoboken and Wilrijk each had a Seefhoek of their own. Seef seems to have disappeared during or soon after the First World War. The Brussels Times dates the end to the 1920s, when Antwerp’s drinkers moved to De Koninck, the amber ale Antwerp still brews in Berchem.

It came back in 2012. Johan Van Dyck, a former international marketing director at Duvel Moortgat, found a book on the history of Antwerp’s breweries in the city library and wondered where they had all gone. He spent about three years in the archives, visiting families who had once owned breweries and talking to very old brewers, and brewed the result with an old sample of Antwerp yeast kept at the University of Leuven. His Antwerpse Brouw Compagnie launched Seefbier in 2012, paid for partly by crowdfunding, and opened its own brewery and tap room in 2017. It stands at Indiëstraat 21, in a former port building on the Eilandje, outside the district that gave the beer its fame.

Workers’ houses and a spire

The Seefhoek began with about 170 workers’ houses. It stayed a working district: in the first years farm labourers came in from the surrounding countryside, and from the late 19th century the diamond trade and the growing port needed hands, and the Seefhoek remained cheap enough for the people who did that work. It still is. The statistical district of Stuivenberg, which largely overlaps with the Seefhoek, had an average rent of €548 a month in the figures VRT NWS published in June 2025, against €678 for the city as a whole.

The same figures explain why the Seefhoek feels full. Stuivenberg has 18,709 residents at a density of 15,870 people per square kilometre, almost six times the Antwerp average of 2,717. More than half of its children, 52.6 per cent, are born into a family classed as deprived, twice the city figure of 26.7 per cent.

Above the rooftops stands the Sint-Amanduskerk at Van Kerckhovenstraat 35. The architects Jan-Lodewijk and Frans Baeckelmans built it between 1869 and 1874 in a neo-Gothic style borrowed from 13th-century French cathedrals, and its spire reaches about 79 metres. The church is a protected monument.

A Ford garage full of books

The Seefhoek’s library is a former garage. Oscar Permeke, a cousin of the painter Constant Permeke, was the first importer and dealer of the Ford Model T in Flanders, from 1912. In 1924 he moved his business into an existing garage on the De Coninckplein and modernised and enlarged it. Permeke Motors left for the edge of the city in 1982, the building stood empty for about fifteen years, and the city bought it in 1997. On 22 April 2005, the last day of Antwerp’s year as World Book Capital, it opened as the city’s main public library, still under the garage owner’s name.

The conversion kept what the cars left behind. The spiral ramp became a staircase lined with computers, the painted signs from the garage years stayed on the walls, and the saw-tooth roofs light the upper floor. The library opens seven days a week and counts about 2,200 visitors a day, and Bart Moeyaert’s poem Binnen, “Inside”, is on display. It was also meant to change the square: Antwerp’s librarians presented Permeke at a professional study day in 2008 as a way to improve the image of what they called a problem neighbourhood. The reviewers’ verdict was that a library cannot fix a neighbourhood on its own.

The Seefhoek now

The neighbourhood had a hard 2025. A fatal stabbing and a heavy fight with stones were followed on the evening of 11 June by a large police operation across Antwerp-Noord that ended with eight arrests. Sim Coddé of the residents’ committee Omarm Stuivenberg told VRT NWS that after the stabbing the residents knew a raid was coming, and that it cannot be the answer every night. “They can’t carry out operations like that every evening,” he said. The committee’s list is practical: more street workers, a police office you can walk into without an appointment, and more public and green space. The street-work charity Free Clinic once had three full-time workers in the 2060 postcode; it now has 0.8 of a post, split between two people.

The largest opportunity is a building that has just emptied. The Stuivenberg hospital moved out in 2023, and most of its site has stood empty since. There were plans to demolish the grey 1980s block and lay out a park; for now they are on hold. The city has named Antwerp-Noord, Seefhoek included, its first priority neighbourhood and is writing an action plan for it. The park should come first: in a district almost six times as dense as the rest of the city, a park on the hospital site will do more than another round of raids.

The creative economy has noticed the rents. The architect Carl Verdickt set up A-SPACE, a coworking space for architects, artists and designers, and told the magazine 21bis in 2021 that the district’s authenticity is what draws creative people. That is the Seefhoek’s oldest pattern repeating itself: people arrive because they can afford to live there.

The café on the corner of the Lange Beeldekensstraat is long gone. The beer is back, brewed on the docks.