Antwerp · Venue

Het Bos

CrowdMate venue profile of Het Bos in Antwerp, Belgium, for concertgoers deciding on a night out.

Upcoming shows
28
Address
5 Ankerrui, 2000 Antwerpen
Next show
Wed, 30 Sept 2026
Het Bos in Antwerp

About Het Bos

At Antwerp’s Het Bos, 200 people can fill a ground-floor concert room built inside a former municipal warehouse. Scheld’apen runs the site as a youth cultural centre and multidisciplinary arts workspace. Its defining piece of engineering is the hall’s box-in-box construction: it is structurally separated from the wider building, an acoustic solution for a venue surrounded by homes. Concertgoers get a compact room nested within a far larger cultural house.

A warehouse becomes a cultural house

Sixteen years before Het Bos opened, a group of young people associated with Scheld’apen had occupied a building at D’Herbouvillekaai 36 seeking an artistic free space; the youth centre spent 14 years there. In August 2012, Antwerp began a major conversion of the Ankerrui municipal warehouse, partially dismantling it to create interior light and two city gardens. Het Bos opened on 2 May 2014, moving Scheld’apen into the central Eilandje. The opening night made its point through format as much as music: theatre-maker Marijs Boulogne’s Lucha Libre spectacle started the evening, then DJs including Hiele, Nosedrip and Sickboy warmed the concert room; the venue says over 1,000 visitors came through its doors. That first weekend also launched the Bosbar.

The room today

Het Bos programs across disciplines and invites proposals that bring surprise, estrangement and challenge; it gives particular space to young artists at the beginning of an artistic path, alongside established artists pursuing side projects or a reset. Electronic bills fit that approach, sharing the calendar with performances, workshops, film, visual art and party formats. For gigs, the main room is on the ground floor; the building adds a first-floor exhibition space, an 80-seat theatre and film room, café, kitchen and gardens. The Bosbar works as the social base before and after a set.

Sources

  1. Info — Het Bos
  2. Ankerrui 5-7 — City of Antwerp
  3. Het Bos is open — StampMedia

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