Place du Luxembourg

The Place du Luxembourg is anchored by the bronze monument to the nineteenth-century industrialist John Cockerill, who stands leaning on an anvil surrounded by four figures representing industrial laborers. Inaugurated in eighteen seventy-two, the statue honors the man credited with pioneering the Belgian steel and railway industries. The square itself was built between eighteen fifty-five and eighteen sixty-one as a grand neoclassical entrance to the original Leopold Quarter railway station.