Kantcentrum vzw
Former convent lace school turned museum, with bobbin-lace demonstrations upstairs.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Kantcentrum in Bruges opens with a girl of five or six bent over a lace pillow for twelve to fourteen hours a day inside a convent lace school on this street, work that would ruin her eyes and her spine long before adulthood. You'll hear how the Apostoline Sisters ran these schools as charity for over a century, and how a reformer named Guillaume de Greef broke the silence in 1876, accusing them in print of trapping poor families in debt through advances against a child's future wages. The scandal drew in a city newspaper, a journalist who toured the lace villages of Flanders, and eventually Belgium's own queen.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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