Safari to the dark side

Emma Beddington finds beauty in the strangest places on a covert tour of a crumbling steel town.

BELGIUM'S charms are sometimes so subtle as to be invisible to the traveller's eye. I'm allowed to say that: I live here. But imagine bypassing the obvious cultural and gastronomic centres that are Bruges, Brussels and Ghent and heading for the depressed former steel town of Charleroi, recently voted "ugliest city in the world" by readers of Dutch newspaper Volkskrant.

Charleroi has one of the highest unemployment rates in Belgium and a moribund coal and steel industry, so it's hard to see what would draw visitors to the country's third-largest city. However, local art graduate Nicolas Buissart has decided to make the most of its decaying industrial heritage with his city safari, an action-packed adventure around a town whose very name strikes fear into the hearts of even the most stoic Belgians.

Charleroi Adventure promises to take visitors on an epic trip that takes in "the place where Magritte's mother committed suicide, the house of the [Belgian serial killer] Marc Dutroux ... and the most depressing street in all of Belgium" for €25 ($35) a person for a five- or six-hour tour, including a picnic. The concept has angered municipal authorities but the safari attracts visitors from across Europe.

At first, Charleroi looks no worse than any medium-sized European manufacturing town; in fact, it's better than many. A brief walk on a Saturday afternoon reveals a lively pedestrianised city centre, with cafes and an organic bakery. I bet you'd have to look hard for an organic vegan muffin in Rotherham.

But these are not the parts of Charleroi the city safari focuses on and Nicolas, a gangly enthusiast, loads me and my fellow adventurer, a student, into the back of his filthy white transit van with instructions to duck if we see a police car.

We set off on our tour of the dark industrial heart of the lowlands. The student, prematurely but presciently, offers me an anti-bacterial wipe. The safari, which involves thrilling amounts of covert climbing through holes in fences and over walls, starts with a walk along the eerily deserted tracks of Charleroi's ghost metro, completed after more than 10 years of work in the early 1980s and, in a triumph of Belgian absurdity, mostly never used. We peer at empty stations ravaged by graffiti and vandalism. We wander into and around the vast, rusting abandoned steelworks, then hike to the top of a slag heap.

Nicolas rather archly points out a spot where we can have our photograph taken next to a burnt-out car and a blackened, blank wall decorated with a mural of a giant, smiling cone of chips, if we so desire. From there, we go on to one of the oldest steelworks in the valley, Les Forges de la Providence, constructed by English steel pioneer John Cockerill in 1836 and now used as a workshop and performance space by local artists. Their beer cans and welding equipment are strewn around the original smelting shop and forge. The scale of these factories is extraordinary; we walk, silenced, through giant cathedrals of industry, broken and deserted.