Zurenborg is named after sour ground. Two rivers, the Herentalse Vaart and the Potvliet, flooded this stretch of land south-east of Antwerp so often that its soil turned acidic, zuur in Dutch, and was worth little until the sixteenth century, when an Antwerp businessman built a farmhouse, dug a wide canal, raised part of the land and planted 180 poplars. The farm stood until 1894, on the spot where the roundabout of the Cogels-Osylei is now. By 1906 most of the neighbourhood around it had been built.

What went up was a district of named houses. Art nouveau is the dominant style, with neoclassical mansions, Gothic Revival, neo-Renaissance, Greek Revival and an English cottage style in between, and the façades call themselves The Sunflower, The Rose or The Tulip. Zurenborg straddles the boundary between Antwerp and Berchem. Its southern part, around the Cogels-Osylei, the Transvaalstraat and the Waterloostraat, was built for the wealthy; its larger northern part, around the Dageraadplaats, for the middle class.

A suburb built by a company

The land became available because Antwerp outgrew its walls. The city had about 50,000 inhabitants around 1800 and more than 300,000 on the eve of the First World War. In 1859 the Belgian government decided on the Brialmont fortifications, a new ring 15 kilometres long with eight forts and nineteen gates, and the old ramparts were replaced by the boulevards now called the Leien: the Amerikalei, Britselei, Frankrijklei and Italiëlei. Between the old line and the new one lay farmland. The Osy family had owned the Zurenborg farm and the fields around it since 1837. In 1880 Eduard Osy and John Cogels sold two hectares of it to the Imperial Continental Gas Association, a London company, for a gas works; the railway had already arrived with Borgerhout station, now Antwerp-East, in 1879.

The rest was parcelled out by a property company that took the name Société Anonyme pour la construction de maisons Bourgeoises after a merger in 1886. It built houses to let, mostly to Catholic tenants, and was run in practice by one man. Louis Luyckx (1857 to 1939) rose from accountant to director and handled almost everything himself, from the correspondence to the screening of tenants; the city’s own walking guide calls him the father of Zurenborg. In 1888 he wrote to the architect Ernest Dieltiens: “We cannot allow poor work to be delivered.” Dieltiens took the Château de Chambord as his model for four groups of white houses, twelve rental homes in all. The company’s offices, at Grotehondstraat 42 to 44, look like the Paris town hall in miniature, and the Cogels-Osylei, named after Baron Osy and Senator Cogels, was the first street in Antwerp with front gardens, an idea taken from England. Its cobbles date from 1894.

Reading the façades

Joseph Bascourt designed 25 of the houses. His Boreas, at Transvaalstraat 56, was the first art nouveau house in Zurenborg, and Lotus and Papyrus stand beside it at numbers 54 and 52. He drew the Four Seasons, four corner houses of 1899 where the Waterloostraat meets the Generaal Van Merlenstraat, and the neoclassical double house Euterpia on the Generaal Capiaumontstraat. His Villa Mercurius on the Cogels-Osylei, built for Karl Fischer, a German wholesaler in tropical timber, fell into disrepair after the First World War and was demolished in 1933. Only its obelisk is left.

Jules Hofman designed The Sunflower, at Cogels-Osylei 50, the best-known of the flower houses between numbers 42 and 52: The Waterlilies, The Iris, The Rose, The Sunflower and The Tulip, where the painter Eugène Joors lived. Hofman also built the Twelve Apostles and the Twelve Demons on the Transvaalstraat, and the Heron House at Guldenvliesstraat 40, where the sculptor Josuë Dupon lived and worked; Dupon also made the bronze camel that stands at Antwerp Zoo. Frans Smet-Verhas gave the Waterloostraat its house The Battle of Waterloo at number 11, and number 30 carries a silhouette of Napoleon. Further along, five tiled houses at numbers 55 to 63 show the times of day. The painter Hippolyte Daeye lived at Cogels-Osylei 45. The newest house of note, at number 31a, is by Christine Conix and dates from 1992.

The street names are a news digest of the 1890s. The Transvaalstraat was named after Paul Kruger‘s visit to Antwerp in April 1894, and the Pretoriastraat and the Krugerstraat followed two years later. The poet Benno Barnard called the Cogels-Osylei one large trompe-l’oeil: grand fronts in front of ordinary rooms. He has a point.

Saved by architects

By the 1960s the houses looked too big and too expensive to heat. Car ownership spread, the upper middle class moved to the suburbs, and Zurenborg became Antwerp’s alternative district. One plan proposed turning the area into offices. In the late 1960s another would have demolished the Cogels-Osylei and its surroundings for a luxury housing complex; a large building company had already put up site fencing. International protest from architects stopped it. A royal decree of 10 January 1980 protected the area around the Cogels-Osylei as a townscape, and on 11 April 1984 a further 170 houses became listed monuments. Public subsidies helped owners restore them, though the city’s guide admits that nearly half of the houses’ decoration has been lost over the years, some of it to woodworm.

Zurenborg is the best argument in Antwerp for protecting whole streets rather than single buildings. Its architects worked in sets: four seasons on four corners, five times of day in a row, five flowers side by side. One Sunflower on its own would be a curiosity. A row of houses answering each other along a boulevard is a district, and that is what the 1980 decree protected.

The Dageraadplaats and the Dôme

The northern half is named after the sky. The Dageraadplaats refers to the sun rising in the east, and the streets of this Oostkwartier are named after star signs and constellations: the Grotehondstraat, the Tweelingenstraat, the Schorpioenstraat. The square has a starry pattern in its paving, a small playground, a basketball court and a football pitch. In the 1970s residents started a Sunday art market here to bring the neighbourhood back to life, and the square has since become one of the most popular places to eat in Antwerp. The neo-Gothic Sint-Norbertuskerk, which Dieltiens designed, has murals of the life of Saint Norbert and holds concerts.

Bascourt also built a café. The rotunda at Grotehondstraat 2 went up in 1893 as the Café du Dôme and has since been a police station, a primary school and a restaurant with a Michelin star; the Dôme, now a brasserie run by Frédéric and Evangeline Chabbert, keeps the name. Frédéric Chabbert and Evangeline Chabbert took it over in 2017, and in March 2026 they opened De Aarde in a protected Bascourt house of 1913 at Generaal Capiaumontstraat 15. Their predecessors at the Dôme, Julien Burlat and Sophie Burlat, still bake in the neighbourhood: Domestic, the Burlats’ bakery on the Steenbokstraat, is at number 37, in a street named after Capricorn.

The eastern edge was given to industry from the start: the gas works, the terminus of a regional tram, and now a bus yard and a power station. On the Draakplaats a railway bridge splits the square between Antwerp and Berchem, and under it hangs a poem by Herman De Coninck (1944 to 1997), who lived in the district for many years. Alongside the tracks between the Draakplaats and the Luitenant Naeyaertplein the city is building a park of about two hectares on the embankment of the old ring railway. It was to be called Spoorpark; the district councils have proposed Statiepark instead, after the former Borgerhout station, and it is due to open in the summer of 2027 with platform 1 of the old Antwerp-East station kept in it.

The poplars that dried out the sour field are long gone. The cobbles of 1894 are still there.