WORDS:
David Whitley
PHOTOGRAPHS:
Pascal Mannaerts
Antwerpen-Centraal station hall
Few great European cities fall under the radar as much as Antwerp. So, arriving here and finding it to be a properly outward-looking, bona fide world city comes as something of a surprise. And a pleasant one, at that. It’s remarkably small to fit into that category — the population is just a smidge over 500,000 — but all efforts to take it down a grade seem to fail. It’s the second-biggest port in Europe, the centre of the world’s diamond industry and among the globe’s fashion capitals.