The second-hand car trade

You can clearly see here what this part of Cureghem – the Heyvaert district – is known for: the intercontinental trade in second-hand cars. With the decline of the Anderlecht Abattoir in the early 1980s, the meat processing companies moved away. The large premises that were left vacant were soon occupied by Belgo-Lebanese car dealers, who exported initially to Lebanon and later to West Africa. The wealthy Lebanese offer their customers a comprehensive service: their import and export garages take care of transportation to the Port of Antwerp, from where specialist shipping companies carry the cars to African ports. Over time, this well-oiled machine has also attracted smaller garage owners and African middlemen to the neighbourhood. You can see the latter at work on Rue de Liverpool and on Rue Heyvaert a little later in the walk, directing customers to the right garages and buying cars themselves.

The car trade has created around a hundred official jobs. This is a relatively low figure given the area occupied by the trade, but around this official structure revolves an informal network of hundreds of people outside the regular employment market. The government has ambitious plans to get rid of the dominant car trade and the nuisance it causes in this district. We will come back to this subject later on.

UiTinBrussel