De Standaard readers are ruthless in ugliest place contest

The winner, with 5,434 votes, is the Belgian coast. Collectively. “Ugly concrete blocks without soul and without style,” wrote one voter. And that’s without even mentioning the marauding seagulls.

Part of the coast, on the waterfront in Ostend, comes the runner-up with 5,218 votes. The installation “Rock Strangers” by Flemish artist Arne Quinze is a series of orange fibreglass shapes that many would-be critics in Ostend have always hoped would be blown into the sea by the next strong wind. Not so far, it seems.

In a distant third place is another fixture local people love to hate: the Stadshal in Ghent, described by one participant as “an unfinished concrete base with a building-site shed on top”. It earned 1,968 votes.

Making up the rest of the top 10: the new city hall in Hasselt (“frightening”), the Hopmarkt in Aalst (“faulty urban renewal”), the Gentbrugge viaduct (adjoining “the saddest houses you can imagine”), the roundabout sculpture “King of the Scheldt” in Oudenaarde, the Antwerp Ring, the Vilvoorde viaduct, and, with 556 votes, the main square in Geel, which, after all that ugliness, looks comparatively innocuous.