Tannery Schotte, main hall

Built during the 1920’s the family owned tannery of Schotte specialized in Chrome tanning to transform hides into leather for shoes and handbags.

For its time this was a revolutionary process of tanning leather (albeit a contemporary environmentalists nightmare because the soil is now contaminated with heavy metals) which proved to be considerably faster than the more traditional method of vegetable tanning and rendered the leather more pliable after the treatment.

The company went bankrupt in 1997.

The building is almost completely demolished at the time of our visit, and soon the site will be remediated to make way for a new project.