The same camera, in the city's other two languages: français · Nederlands
What is in the frame
The camera sits high in the City Hall stonework and looks north-east across the square. The lens is wide enough to hold all of it at once: the cobbles in the middle, the gabled fronts along the far side, the row of houses running down the left. A corner of the City Hall's own pinnacles stands in the near edge of the picture, with a cable crossing above it.
Being above the square is the whole point of it. From the ground you see one facade at a time. From up there you see how little space there is between the buildings and the people, which is the thing about this square that photographs never get across.
The stream is 2688 by 1512 pixels at twenty-four frames a second, and carries no sound at all. Full screen on a laptop you can follow one person the length of the cobbles.
When it is worth opening
A live picture of a square is dull most of the day. These are the hours we actually look.
First thing in the morning
The square empties out overnight and stays empty for a while after it gets light. Early is the only time the cobbles read as a surface of their own.
After dark
The facades are lit and everything between them goes black, so the square reads as a ring of gold fronts with nothing in the middle. It is the one time the webcam looks better than a photograph.
While something is being built
Anything that stands on this square has to be assembled on it first. Open the camera during a build and you get marquees going up along the edge of the cobbles, lorries where the terraces normally are, and barriers stacked in the middle.
December, and the flower carpet
The Christmas market fills the square every December. Every two years in August the middle of it disappears under a carpet of begonias, which is the one thing on this square that is genuinely better from above.
One warning. The camera points at an open square in Belgium, so a good part of the year it is pointed at rain.
Why it does not play on this page
We would rather have put the picture here, and we tried. The city allows the stream to load on its own sites and turns away every other address, and its player page cannot be framed elsewhere either. Both settings are the city's to make, and working around them would mean serving their pictures off our own machine at their expense.
So the button above goes where the camera actually lives. If the city ever publishes an embed of its own, this page will carry it that day.
What you are looking at
Every building in that picture has a page here.
- The square, building by building. All thirty-four of them, drawn to scale from the city survey.
- The City Hall. The building the camera sits in, and the one on the square whose walls came through 1695.
- The Grand-Place. What to do with it once you are standing on it.