Martin Westlake.


Martin Westlake has followed parallel careers as a civil servant and as an academic and has lived, studied, and worked in the UK, Italy, France, and Belgium. Since taking early retirement as a civil servant, he has been pursuing a new parallel career as an author of creative fiction. Westlake, who has British and Belgian nationality, is much interested in local history. He is currently seeking an agent for his first full-length creative history novel, Where Lies the Land, which starts in the Belgian Ardennes in August 1914 and ends in the Alberta Plains (Canada) in November 1918.

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28 January 2022
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Schaerbeek’s Maison des Arts: a hidden jewel and a testament to rapid urbanisation

Schaerbeek, it is increasingly said, is ‘the new St Gilles’. On a warm (or a snowy) day, Parc Josaphat bustles with what were once referred to […]
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28 April 2021
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The day a Spitfire landed on a Brussels roof top

Cities that have been at war bear all sorts of scars. Some are unavoidable and easily spotted – a gap, like a missing tooth, in a […]
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16 April 2021
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The WWII sacrifices behind a grey plaque on a striking Schaerbeek building

On the corner of Avenue Eugène Plasky and rue du Saphir in Schaerbeek stands a distinctive house, built in 1930. It was designed by Belgian architect […]
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2 April 2021
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The Belgian bunkers in Bertem’s fields and the forgotten battle of May 1940

The rolling land around Leuven is peppered with Second World War bunkers. Unlike the monsters of the Atlantic Wall, designed to deter as well as to […]
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26 October 2020
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Gouldings: Discovering the secrets of Monument Valley

Think Stagecoach; think The Searchers; think The Eiger Sanction; think Forrest Gump. What do they all have in common? Answer; the spectacular backdrop of Monument Valley, […]
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