The Elisabethlaan, a wet meadow, barracks and a garden suburb

"The workmen's neighborhood is in a deplorable condition..." these were the words of the High Royal Commissioner F. André when the plan for Aarschot was presented at the reconstruction exhibition in Mons in February 1920. He continued: "I'm going to tear it down, but first and foremost a new workmen's district will be built in the middle of hovingen." It is clear that André was referring to the destruction of Aarschot and that the workmen's neighborhood is the Grecht, a neighborhood in the city with a dubious reputation. It had suffered little from the violence of the war, but as an urban blight it had to disappear and make way for a neighborhood for the better servants. The Grecht remained a neglected area for a long time, but the garden city has been created.

When the construction of the garden city began, there were about seventy emergency homes in the Elisabethlaan. They were barracks of the King Albert Fund and probably came from the Belgian refugees in the Netherlands. The housing shortage in Aarschot was and remained high for a long time. At the beginning of the 1930s, these barracks had not all disappeared.

Here, on the corner of Dahliastraat and Elisabethlaan, you have a good view of various aspects of the garden city concept. If you look into the Dahliastraat, you will see that the street is not a straight line but a curve. Clean lines were shunned. There was something relaxing about curved lines and carried an anticipation of what would come after the turn. In addition, the facades of the houses in the bend came into their own and there was the playful image of the roofs.

This principle was difficult to maintain on Elisabethlaan. After all, the route followed the existing Grote Vest. But that is made up for by avoiding terraced houses, but connecting linked blocks of two, four and a maximum of six houses. In addition, this avenue was then a real green avenue planted with tall trees. The front gardens, which had to be kept in order, did the rest to create a pleasant neighborhood.

You will have noticed that the corner houses have a different style than the other houses in the immediate neighborhood. These houses were built a good decade later, at a time when art deco was becoming decisive. You notice this in the rather angular lines, the horizontal bands, the rounded and triangular protrusion of a window on the first floor. In addition, there were large windows on the ground floor. This was no coincidence, because the houses were intended as a 'business' and a shop window was indispensable. There would have been a bakery and an electrical shop with radios, among other things. It was not uncommon for the houses at the entrance to the garden city to look a little different from the rest, sometimes even a little more 'rich'. They marked the entrance to the district, as it were.

The land on which the houses were built was anything but an interesting building plot. For centuries these were wet meadows, the Gasthuisbeemden. The groundwater was high. A cellar was therefore impossible. Under the stairs there was a small storeroom, a few steps deep. In some houses you can see the small window for the lighting next to the front door against the ground.

Water in the basement and rising damp were not uncommon. It is no coincidence that the residents made frantic attempts to protect the lower part of the façade. Later plinths show a variety of materials and colours: grey cement, bluestone, a mosaic of flagstones, etc.

Jan Rymenams