“This town (town) is coming like a ghost town
All the clubs have been closed down”
- Ghost Town, The Specials
It’s just past 9 p.m. and the streets of Ostend are empty. We have escaped Brussels for a long weekend: The city’s empty, gray streets and shuttered shop fronts have curdled into familiar contempt. But the situation on the Belgian coast is no different. Like Brussels, Ostend and the rest of Belgium have been on COVID-19 lockdown for several weeks already, as the country struggles to emerge from one of Europe’s worst outbreaks.
The Ostend we arrive in is disconcerting. The weather is unseasonably warm for the end of the year. While the arrow-straight promenade is dense with visiting day trippers in daylight, by nightfall the beachfront is abandoned, save for the odd food courier whistling by on their bike. The only lights illuminating this ghost town are distant flashing signals of an offshore wind farm, and the melancholy blue spotlights spilling out from the empty casino.
Walking through the knot of cobbled streets behind the beach, two things are prominent: the bright lights of the few takeaway joints and snack bars still operating, and, on the shuttered bars and restaurants, a ubiquitous poster. One of them hangs in the window of the city’s minuscule brewery, Stadsbrouwerij 't Koelschip, which is so small it stores its grain mill out on the sidewalk. The poster features the city’s unofficial cartoon mascot, Cowboy Henk, a mural of whom also looms large across the street. Henk has a message for the government, a play on the Flemish expression for a free round: Tournée Fatale: laat de horeca niet vallen (“Tournée Fatale: don’t let hospitality down”).
It’s unclear how long government support for bars and restaurants will last, and even then if it will be enough to prevent the mass bankruptcy of an industry, let alone a return to some semblance of pre-pandemic normality. Brussels, Ostend, wherever—Belgium’s cities are likely to be haunted for some time to come.
“Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?
We danced and sang, and the music played in a de boomtown”
