Garden-City Bouvier-Washer
Until recently, little was known about the origins of this garden city, except that it was built after the First World War for wounded soldiers. After four months of intensive review of materials in various archives, Martine Kuhn and Colette Storms presented the results of their research on 8 November 2021 during a lecture in the Agora hall of Kraainem. The presentation of this conference can be consulted here. The lecture can be viewed on the Discover Kraainem YouTube channel. You can find the summary of the lecture here. Some aspects still need to be explored further. Discover Kraainem would like to place an information panel at the entrance of the garden city and write a brochure with detailed explanations, plans and photos. Discover Kraainem also wants to encourage residents to celebrate the 100th anniversary of their neighborhood in 2023.
Watermill
The Watermill of Kraainem on the water stream Kleine Maelbeek dates back to the 14th century and was part of a network of over 20 mills on the Woluwe river and streams flowing into the Woluwe. The mill was operated until 1965 and was demolished in the 1970’s as it had fallen into disrepair. Not much is left, unfortunately, and we plan to restore the wooden water wheel of the former mill, to connect it to a small generator and to build a terrace around it to see how all this operates. Besides reconnecting the neighbourhood with its history we plan educational activities focusing on the importance of rivers for human settlements, the milling techniques and its impact on the village economy, the power of water and how it can be used to generate electricity. The electricity produced by the small generator could be used to illuminate multilingual educational panels that we plan to set up along the terrace. We are in the process of getting a land surveyor to measure the topography and to establish a mock up of our project. This will allow us to engage the formal procedure with the municipal authorities to obtain approval and support for this project. We have already received positive feedback from a number of citizens of Kraainem.
Panels
Some monuments, like the Saint Pancras Church are well explained by multilingual panels as can be seen on the picture here. However, there a number of building in Kraainem which the casual walker will not know and which would benefit from such panels. We have identified about ten monuments for which we plan to write the background information during the next few months in order to suggest to the municipal authorities to set up such panels. Once we have finalized the list of these ten monuments we will share the names on this website in due course.