Report - Triage-Lavoir de Peronnes, (Coal Washery) June 2011

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Triage-Lavoir de Péronnes is a former coal washing facility that was built with the help of the Marshall Plan in 1954. It was built for the demand of the coal industry to process the coal coming from the mines of Péronnes, Ressaix and Trivières. It was capable processing over 3,000 tons of coal daily. In 1969 the nearby coal mines in Saint-Albert and Sint-Margriete were closed, which caused Triage-Lavoir to become useless, and it was closed down after only 15 years of active operation.

Immediately after closing the facility, all the machines and equipments were removed and the facility stayed abandoned for over 3 decades.

The building was under threat of demolition in 2000 but on May 15, 2003, it was classified as a monument to be saved.

Currently the building is under renovation financed by the European Union and the Walloon Region through the Marshall Plan of Wallonia program.The renovation started in September 2005. The renovation of the exterior of the building was scheduled to be finished by September of 2006. The budget for the walls was 2.1 million euros. In the spring of 2010 the renovation work was still in progress. The exterior and a small fraction of the ground floor has been rebuilt. Certain parts of the old building will be left untouched, other than cleaning and careful restoring, in order to preserve the building's unique architectural elements. Inside the back of the building, half buried in the ground, new storage rooms will be built for the companies to use.

The renovated building is supposed host several organisations, including The General Archives of the Royalty (intermediate centre of archives), Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium (stores coal and fossil core-samples), the IFAPME (center of professional development: contemporary artwork, design) and some private offices.

Well they fixed up the exterior, painted it and put new double glazing in, but I guess the recession put paid to the rest...

Visited with Rookinella. This was on our Euro-list, just as a big empty thing to see. We thought it was maybe a hospital or a factory. We drove up to it in a thunderstorm, the windows and paintjob made it look like another converted fail, but the overgrown grounds said otherwise.

Downstairs was a mockup plasterboarded office type setting, upstairs left a smashed bathhouse. Final stairs expecting not much and walking in the door it's complete ZOMGWTF

Lets get one thing straight, there's not a sniff of equipment left in this place, not any trace of anything except bare concrete. It's insane though, just pure large scale industrial epic, all levels and stairs and curved roof and 50's epic. With wind whistling around, rain pouring down, birds flying about it was absolutely mind blowing. Grinning from ear to ear. Completely unexpected win. Check this out:


Before the windows were fixed:

Oh, and one of the collieries had slight epic about it too: