Book Ypres attraction tickets

Few towns in Europe carry the weight of memory as visibly as Ypres. Known in Flemish as Ieper, this small city in the West Flanders province of Belgium was almost entirely razed during the First World War, its medieval cloth hall and cathedral reduced to rubble across four years of relentless bombardment. That it was rebuilt, stone by stone, to its pre-war appearance in the decades that followed is one of the more remarkable acts of civic determination in modern European history. The Menin Gate, inscribed with the names of nearly 55,000 Commonwealth soldiers who have no known grave, stands at the eastern edge of the old town and has been the site of the Last Post ceremony every evening since 1928, a tradition interrupted only during the German occupation of the Second World War.

The Grote Markt, the central square, is the natural starting point for any visit. The reconstructed Lakenhalle, or Cloth Hall, dominates the square with a facade that stretches nearly 130 metres and speaks to the extraordinary mercantile wealth Ypres commanded in the medieval period, when it was one of the most important textile cities in northern Europe. The In Flanders Fields Museum, housed within the Cloth Hall itself, offers one of the most thoughtfully assembled accounts of the First World War available anywhere on the Salient, drawing on personal testimonies and artefacts to place individual lives against the broader catastrophe.