The building standing before you, the Brouwershuis, has worn many hats over the centuries, but its story begins with a very practical problem: breweries need enormous amounts of water, and in 16th-century Antwerp, getting it there reliably was no small feat.
In 1553, the ambitious entrepreneur Gilbert van Schoonbeke solved that problem in style. He built this house as a pumping station, with horses walking a mill in the basement to draw water up from the Herentalse canal. That water was stored in large wooden reservoirs on the upper floors, then piped out through lead pipes to sixteen breweries in the surrounding streets. Clean, reliable water delivered directly to your door was something genuinely extraordinary at the time.
The city bought the building in 1561, and over the following decades the brewers' guild made the upper hall their meeting place, gathering beneath ornately decorated ceilings to talk trade, settle disputes, and probably drink quite a lot of what they made.
By the 19th century, hydraulic pumps had replaced the horses, and metal tanks had taken over from the wooden reservoirs. The building kept distributing water until 1930, when it finally retired and became a museum.
So the horses put in roughly four centuries of work before anyone thought to give them a break.
Sources. Story: Brouwershuis – vzw De Vrienden van het Brouwershuis'] Photos: FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
