Magical misery tour

WITH its high unemployment, pervasive crime and rows of empty shops, the Belgian town of Charleroi is a “musée de la globalisation”, quips Nico Buissart, with something approaching pride. The former art student has run tours of his town, which was once voted the ugliest place in Europe, since 2009; he now conducts two or three a week. When Charlemagne took the tour, the hulking Mr Buissart led the group down concrete paths littered with scrap metal and defaced by graffiti, under the shadow of looming steelworks, through waist-high weeds and up an enormous slag heap to take in the view of old factories and piles of waste from industries that have mostly moved elsewhere.

Eccentric souls have long enjoyed exploring miserable bits of the continent. Valencia boasts a guided tour of the numerous big-ticket construction projects, some of them abandoned, launched by its corrupt politicians. In eastern Europe, fans of Soviet architecture regularly trek to long-forgotten places to uncover hidden brutalist gems. An alternative German guide to Berlin suggests spurning the Tiergarten and the Brandenburg Gate in favour of the hideous Schwerbelastungskörper, a cylinder of concrete laid down by Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s architect, which is so gargantuan that it cannot be moved.