Rotondes

Behind the station, on the Bonnevoie side of the tracks, stand two round brick sheds fifty-two metres across and fifteen high. They are the Rotondes — the roundhouses — and they were built in 1877, when the railway was young and the locomotives ran on steam and needed a warm place to sleep. Each one could stable eighteen engines around its turntable. Thirty years later, in 1907, a new depot opened at Howald and the roundhouses were left with nothing to do, which is the state they stayed in for most of a century: a warehouse for the railway until 1999, a bus garage until 2006. They were listed as national monuments in 1991 all the same, because there is nothing else like them in the country.

When Luxembourg was European Capital of Culture in 2007 the two sheds were pressed into service for exhibitions and a restaurant, and people saw what they could be. The railway had already handed them to the state; in 2010 the buildings administration was given sixteen million euros to turn them into a cultural centre, and after the plans were argued over, work began in 2013. They reopened in the summer of 2015.

Since then the southern roundhouse holds a theatre for 350 people, a gallery and a hall for talks and films; the northern one, only half restored, has a bar and a concert club inside a wooden shell; and between them a "container city" houses a black-box stage, the studios of Radio Ara and rooms where children's workshops and rehearsals go on all week. It is a place for families by day and for concerts by night, and the engines' smoke is still on the bricks.