My first trip abroad was in 1958. The school I was at, newly opened in 1957, decided that travel could be a valuable part of our education and organised a one week trip to Belgium at a cost of £11 10s. We were based in Blankenberge, staying at the Hotel Pension Flots du Nord. Trips out by coach included Bruges, Brussels, Ghent, Ostend and Zeebrugge.
Knowing our school, we were probably made to write about the trip when we got back, but that record has disappeared in a thoughtless fit of decluttering. Fragmentary memories remain: sharing rooms for the first time; packed lunches of cheese rolls; swans on the canal in Bruges; climbing a church tower in Ghent(?); the WW1 blockade of the harbour at Zeebrugge; furtively smoking readily available cigarettes on the beach; shops stocked with all sorts of things (decorative cigarette lighters stick in my mind) not available at home; novelty bicycles with elliptical wheels and hinged frames on a track near the beach in Blankenberge; and the Mannekin Pis in Brussels and wanting to buy a model of the Atomium (opened for the World’s Fair that year) and envying those who could afford one. Would our Headmaster have hoped for something more life-shaping?
I took photographs with a Brownie 127. All that remain are two small prints, one of swans on a canal in Bruges the other the view from my hotel room in Blankenberge. The latter is strangely prescient in the light of my recent Room with a View project and photo book, see post 22nd August 2014.
I have very little recollection of Pension Flots du Nord, apart from an open entrance lobby and the location by a busy road. However, the building still exists and is on the Belgian Inventory of Architectural Heritage. It is described as follows: ‘The Saedeleer Helling number 7. So-called “Hotel Pension Flots du Nord” or “Philippe” cf. faded inscriptions, probably from 1909, designed by the architect Ghent De Coutere. Four floors below flat roof. Yellow brick building, cemented and painted surfaces. Depositing of the New Objectivity cf. diagonal and exposed concrete balconies, accentuated in the parapet.’ See https://inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be/dibe/relict/44847