Finance History | Handelsbeurs, Antwerp, 1531 — The Exchange Built for Talking, Not for Goods

Stand in the courtyard and look for somewhere to put a bale of cloth. There is nowhere, and that was the design. Antwerp's wholesalers had won permission from the city magistrate in 1485 to keep a common exchange, a gemeyne borze. It proved too small, plans for a replacement were drawn up in 1526 and 1527, and the new building opened in 1531 in the Twaalfmaandenstraat, off the Meir. Domien de Waghemakere designed it in late Brabantine Gothic: a rectangular open court enclosed by a covered colonnade under star and net vaults, set down over a street intersection. A market for goods needs floor space, scales and a door wide enough for a cart. This one has a colonnade and an empty middle, because what was being exchanged was information and obligation. Merchants at Antwerp dealt in bills of exchange, in cargoes still at sea, in commodity contracts and increasingly in loans to the crowns of Spain, Portugal and England. Every foreign nation kept a more or less permanent standing place under the galleries, so a merchant knew exactly where to find the Genoese or the Fuggers' man. The dedication carved for the building offered it to traders of every nation and language. Sources give slightly different Latin wordings, so the sentiment is better reported than quoted. Thomas Gresham, the English crown's agent in Antwerp, took the plan home with him. London's exchange followed in the 1560s on the Antwerp model, and Middelburg came in 1592, Rotterdam in 1595 and Amsterdam in 1611. Antwerp's own run was short. The city fell to Spanish forces in 1584 and 1585, the trade moved north to Amsterdam, and by 1661 the exchange had lapsed into other uses, including a drawing academy and the seat of the Guild of Saint Luke. The building burned in 1583 and was rebuilt to the same plan. It burned again on 2 August 1858, after which the city ran two design competitions on the condition that the old arrangement be preserved. What stands now is Joseph Schadde's building, finished in 1872, neo-Gothic arcades under an iron and glass roof — the plan of 1531 with a lid on it. Shares were traded here until 1997, when the exchange merged into Brussels. Claims that this was the first purpose-built exchange anywhere should be treated with care, since Antwerp itself had the 1485 arrangement and an earlier Oude Beurs before this one. What is not in doubt is that this plan was the one everybody copied. After fifteen years of neglect and a long restoration, it reopened in October 2019 as an events venue. The ground floor and the central court are open to the public at weekends. Cover image: photochrom of the Bourse interior by Photoglob Co., Library of Congress, public domain. It shows Schadde's galleried courtyard under its iron and glass roof, so the arcades are of 1872 and the arrangement is the one inherited from 1531. Second image: Roosde, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, the exterior. Coordinates 51.219338, 4.406155, resolved by Nominatim and matching a Commons geotag to within a few metres.