A short walk from the Grote Markt, the Museum Godshuis Belle occupies a restored 17th-century almshouse — a godshuis, in Dutch, being a charitable institution for the poor and elderly. The museum covers the history of Ypres from the medieval cloth trade through to the eve of the First World War, providing the pre-war context that the Flanders Fields Museum necessarily glosses over.
The building itself is the attraction as much as the collection: a peaceful courtyard surrounded by brick cottages, the kind of small-scale civic architecture that the war destroyed across Flanders and that survived here. If you want to understand what Ypres was like before 1914 — a prosperous Flemish market town with a long civic history — this is the place to find out.