The Ypres Cloth Hall is one of the largest Gothic secular buildings in the world — 133 metres long, with a 70-metre belfry — and was built between 1200 and 1304 when Ypres was one of the great cloth-trading cities of medieval Europe. By November 1918 it was rubble.
What stands on the Grote Markt today is a painstaking reconstruction, so faithful to the original that it is effectively impossible to distinguish the rebuilt medieval from the actually medieval. The experience of standing in front of it is slightly vertiginous once you know the history — this vast, confident Gothic structure is, in the strictest sense, about a century old. The reconstruction is itself a monument: to what Belgium lost, and to the determination to recover it.
The hall houses the In Flanders Fields Museum (see separate entry) and the belfry can be climbed for views over the reconstructed town and, beyond it, the flat Flanders countryside where the cemeteries begin.