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Abandoned Sainctelette metro station to be put to use

20:27 07/02/2018

Little did you know that there was a long-abandoned metro station under the ground where Sainctelette meets the Brussels inner ring road. Users of metro lines 2 and 6 can just about make out the never-used platforms between Yser and Ribaucourt.

The rough outline of a metro station was started here in the 1980s when the line between Rogier and Simonis was laid. But the city decided that the station was simply unneccesary, being located just half a kilometre from the other two metro stations.

“When the metro was built, this neighbourhood wasn’t developed yet,” Inge Paemen of Bruxelles Mobilité told Bruzz last year during a video segment on the station. “The KBC buildings weren’t here, and neither were the French Community offices. Kaaitheater didn’t exist. This neighbourhood has only been developed in recent years.”

Now Brussels mobility minister Pascal Smet has ordered a study into the feasability of using the space for another purpose. “This neighbourhood has really come alive,” he told Bruzz this week. “This about the Tour & Taxis site and the new Citroën Museum.”

Smet has also included unused spaces at Yser and Anneessens metro stations in the study. Those spaces were once created to be used for future second underground lines that never materialised.

Aside from the study on work required and costs, Smet’s office has issued a call for proposals from organisations that would like to use the spaces. “This would be ideal space for a skate park, for instance,” he says, “or a circus school.”

The results of the study are expected within a few months.

Written by Lisa Bradshaw