A little-known village in Wallonia, Belgium, is the first site in the country to receive a UNESCO World Heritage plaque for its First World War (WWI) memorial heritage.
The plaque was unveiled at the Ploegsteert Memorial during a ceremony attended by diplomatic representatives from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany and Ireland, alongside Comines-Warneton mayor Alice Leeuwerck, local officials and schoolchildren. Ploegsteert lies in the westernmost part of Wallonia, in Hainaut province, on the French border and just south of Ypres.
The recognition comes after a process that began in 2016 and eventually led to 139 WWI cemeteries and memorial sites along the former Western Front being inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2023.
The transnational site stretches across Belgium and France, following a front that once ran for around 700 kilometres from the North Sea to the Franco-Swiss border.
The list comprises 96 sites in France and 43 in Belgium, split between Flanders, with 27, and Wallonia, with 16. Eight of the Walloon sites are located in Comines-Warneton, an extraordinary concentration of WWI heritage in this small border municipality that reflects the intensity and scale of the fighting in the region.
“This recognition is powerful. There are even children here who may have had to flee from war themselves. Heritage is not an end in itself, but it connects people,” said Yves Rouyet, chair of the Belgian Commission for UNESCO.
He also pointed out that soldiers from China and Africa, “who are often forgotten”, fell here too, and said remembering their stories helps to break down “barriers of racism”.
British troops arrived in the area in October 1914 and dug in around Ploegsteert. Struggling to pronounce the name of the village, they nicknamed it “Plugstreet”.
Unlike nearby Ypres, the sector was not the scene of major offensives. After heavy fighting in 1914 and 1915, Ploegsteert Wood became a comparatively quiet sector of the Western Front and was used as a rest area by British and Commonwealth troops. Quiet was relative, however: soldiers stationed there still endured years of trench warfare, shelling, raids and underground mine warfare, and many of those killed died in the daily attrition of holding the front line.
The area is also associated with a rare heart-warming episode of this war, when it became the unlikely scene of the Christmas Truce. On 24 December 1914, British and German soldiers in several sections of the Western Front spontaneously stopped fighting, sang carols and met in the no man’s land between the opposing lines to celebrate Christmas.
Across the Western Front, more than two million soldiers were buried in military cemeteries and necropolises, while hundreds of thousands remained missing or unidentified.
At the ceremony, Leeuwerck highlighted the potential impact of the UNESCO recognition on tourism and the local economy. She said the 2014-2018 centenary commemorations had been an important period for remembrance tourism and hoped the UNESCO designation would “breathe new life” into the sector, including south of Ypres.
The ceremony ended with a special Last Post at the Ploegsteert Memorial. The monument commemorates more than 11,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen who died in the surrounding area and have no known grave.
Six further plaque unveilings will take place in Belgium, with the next planned for 6 October at Tyne Cot Cemetery in Zonnebeke. Additional ceremonies will be held in Heuvelland, Ypres, Nieuwpoort, Poperinge and Mons.
