Sint-Andries began with a heresy trial. Augustinian friars from the monastery at Enkhuizen came to Antwerp in 1510, built a chapel in 1513 and a monastery the year after, and in 1517 declared for Luther’s teaching. They were arrested on 6 October 1522 and their monastery was demolished early in 1523. Two of them, Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos, were burned at the stake on the Grand Place in Brussels on 1 July that year. The same summer Pope Adrian VI signed the bull founding a new parish in their unfinished church, and in 1529 it was consecrated to Saint Andrew.

The parish gave its name to the district around it. Sint-Andries is an old working-class quarter of Antwerp: the University of Antwerp, which mapped its houses and residents for a digital time machine, counts the Museum Plantin-Moretus, the Vrijdagmarkt and the Hoogstraat, the oldest street in the city, among its landmarks. In the 19th century the parish was known as the parish of misery, because most of the people who lived in it were poor. Today the Nationalestraat and the Kammenstraat run through it, and the city’s fashion museum is on the Nationalestraat.

The church on the Waaistraat

The Sint-Andrieskerk, at Waaistraat 1, is a late-Gothic cross-shaped church with a mostly baroque interior. The master builder Domien de Waghemakere designed it for the friars, the side aisles were added between 1555 and 1560, and the transept, high choir and side chapels came in the 17th century. Its history is a list of Antwerp’s troubles. The church was damaged in the iconoclasm of 1566, shared between Catholics and Calvinists from 1568, and restored after Catholic worship returned in 1585. Its tower collapsed in 1755, destroying many of the tombs, and Engelbert Baets designed the upper part that was finished in 1763. The French closed the church from 1797 to 1802; a bombardment set it on fire in 1830; and a V-bomb in 1945 partly destroyed its neo-Gothic windows of the 19th century, which were replaced with modern glass in the 1960s. Marc De Vooght drew a new lantern for the tower in 1968, and a restoration ran from 1970 to 1975. The church has been a protected monument since 25 March 1938.

Jan Baptist Van Hool and Jan Frans Van Geel carved the pulpit in 1821 as a scene from the Gospel: the fishermen Andrew and Peter, life-size, in a boat with oars and nets, being called by Jesus to follow him. Among the paintings are Otto van Veen‘s Martyrdom of Saint Andrew of 1599 and works by Frans Francken the Younger and Erasmus Quellinus the Younger. The high altar came from the abbey of Sint-Bernard at Hemiksem. A triptych by Maerten de Vos was confiscated by the French and ended up in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, the KMSKA.

Two Scottish ladies

In the right-hand aisle is a memorial with a Scottish story. Barbara Mowbray and her sister-in-law Elisabeth Curle were ladies-in-waiting to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, who was executed in England. They fled Scotland, settled in Antwerp around 1589, lived on the Sint-Andriesstraat and were buried in the church. Their monument was commissioned in 1620 and made by Robert De Nole and Jan De Nole. It carries a copper portrait of the queen after Frans Pourbus the Younger, with statues of their namesakes, Saint Barbara and Saint Elisabeth, and the Virgin and Child at the top. Few of the church’s original memorials survive, partly because of the tower’s collapse, and partly because Joseph II banned burials in churches in 1784.

The Virgin on the Lady altar has a more recent connection. In 2001, when the altar of the Minters, also called the Euro altar, was rebuilt, Ann Demeulemeester, one of the Antwerp Six, made a gown for the statue of the Virgin. This is the best detail in the church: a church in what was called the parish of misery has a Madonna dressed by a designer whose generation now fills the fashion museum a few streets away. No shop on the Nationalestraat explains what became of Sint-Andries as neatly.

The friars come back

The Augustinians did return. They came back to Antwerp in 1607 and built the Sint-Augustinuskerk at Kammenstraat 73 between 1615 and 1618, to a design by Wenzel Cobergher. For its altars Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens painted three altarpieces in 1628, which are now in the KMSKA as well. The church was a parish church until 1973, was restored in two campaigns, and since 2006 it has been AMUZ, an international music centre. In 2018 Jan Fabre installed three new altarpieces in it, made from the wing cases of jewel beetles.

Rebuilding the parish

Part of the parish was cleared in the 1970s. Between the Waaistraat, the Lange Ridderstraat, the Sint-Andriesstraat and the Augustijnenstraat almost every building came down for De Munt, a social housing scheme for the housing company De Goede Woning. The architects Lode Wouters, Fons Mostien and Boud Rombouts won its competition in 1974; a suspended building permit delayed it, and its 26 flats in 13 buildings were delivered in 1982 around the Pastoor Visschersplein, a square opened up towards the church. The heritage inventory counts it as a notable example of architecture designed to fit its setting.

The next project is on the Sint-Andriesplaats. From the second half of the 18th century to the middle of the 20th, the city’s public cleaning service was based on a site there, with a large hangar of 1884, stables, among them one for sick animals, a director’s house and a boys’ school. From 1994 it was coStA, a district cultural centre, which closed after the summer of 2024. The 3,150 square metres between the Sint-Andriesplaats and the Prekersstraat are being rebuilt as ANDRS, with a library, studios, a rehearsal room and space for nine organisations, the local scouts among them. The hangars, the school gym and the old stables stay; the teacher’s house and the director’s house are being restored. Work started on 2 March 2026 with archaeological research and is due to be handed over at the end of 2028. Annick De Ridder, chair of the city property company AG Vespa, called it “a transformation of slightly historic proportions for a historic district”. Its slogan is a pun: Andries. Anders. Andries, different.

The fashion streets

The Nationalestraat is a 19th-century cut. Between 1876 and 1884 the Parisian builder Hubert Pierquin drove it through the old Boeksteeg, 15 metres wide and 700 metres long. Dries Van Noten bought the art nouveau building at number 16, on the corner of the Kammenstraat, in 1989 and made it his flagship, Het Modepaleis. MoMu, the fashion museum at Nationalestraat 28, opened on 21 September 2002 and is showing The Antwerp Six, the first major exhibition of the six Academy graduates together, until 17 January 2027. Next door, the Kloosterstraat, the antiques street named after a vanished abbey, runs on towards the Zuid.

The parish was founded on the ruins of a monastery, two of whose friars went to the stake. Five centuries later, the Virgin in its church wears Demeulemeester.