I started at the University of Luxembourg on Saturday 1 August 2015, as its first Social Media Manager.

Today is 1 August again, eleven years later, and it has landed on a Saturday. I have been thinking about that all week.

Eighteen days ago I passed four thousand days here. Yes, I count. Today is four thousand and eighteen.

Belval was a different place in 2015. The esplanade was there but the life had not arrived. You could stand on it and see straight through the gaps where the rest of the buildings were going to be. Students were already turning up, a bit early, while the cranes were still doing the heavy work around them.

I thought it would take a generation. It took about a decade.

My job was to tell the University’s story, and eleven years of that teaches you to look for the story inside the announcement. It is a useful habit. It is also impossible to switch off.

Which is how I ended up noticing everything else.

A café opened on the Avenue du Rock’n’Roll. Then another. Somebody put a bicycle workshop inside the railway station and started teaching adults to ride. The blast furnaces spent decades being the past and then quietly became something you could climb. And the streets here are named after music: Rock’n’Roll, Swing, Blues, Jazz, and one after a concert hall in Paris.

I kept finding these things by accident. Somebody mentions something in a queue. You walk past on the right afternoon. There was no list anywhere, and I kept thinking somebody should make one.

Nobody did.

So I built it. A couple of weeks, mostly evenings and weekends, and more short nights than I will admit to here. Not for the University, not for work, not for anybody’s strategy. Just because eleven years of paying attention to a place ought to be worth something to the people living in it.

It is called I Love Belval, and it is at ilovebelval.com.

Over a hundred places so far. Where to eat, where to study, where to buy things, where to catch a train. Everything that is on. What opens, what closes, and the small changes that tell you a neighbourhood is alive.

It is independent and it is free. My employer knows, and has been lovely about it.

Eleven years ago I arrived somewhere still under construction and was told, more or less, to go and find the stories. I have been doing it ever since. This is what happens when you keep at it long enough and then decide to give the whole lot away.

Belval, thank you. For eleven years, and for whatever comes next.
Posted at 11:11, naturally.
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