Considered to be Brussels’ first genuine suburb, Anderlecht is now best known as an industrial area, for its meat market, and its successful soccer club of the same name. Despite this, the modernist Spanish painter Joan Miro added a unique artistic contribution inspiring bright cartoon-like murals on Rue Porcelaine.

Although only a few pockets of the suburb are now residential, during the fifteenth century this was a popular place of abode and some houses remain from that era. Maison Erasme, built in 1468, is now named after the great scholar and religious reformer, Erasmus, who lived here for five months in 1521. The house was restored in the 1930s. Now a museum dedicated to the most respected thinker of his generation; it displays a collection of sixteenth century furniture and portraits of the great humanist by Holbein and van der Weyden.

Nearby is the huge edifice of Eglise Sts-Pierre-et-Guidon. This fourteenth century Gothic church, completed with the addition of a tower in 1517, is notable for its sheer size and exterior gables, typical of Brabant architecture.