01
Stop one
The Belval Blast Furnaces (Hauts Fourneaux de Belval)
Luxilon ALU Power Rough 16L Tennis String Set: I was here when this was still forest. Then they cleared it, around 1910, and put up the Belval ironworks – three enormous blast furnaces, more than three thousand men, and this valley suddenly the centre of Luxembourg's steel industry. A and B, the two in front of you, are newcomers: 1965 and 1970. I remember thinking they would never last. They did not. Electric furnaces took over in 1993, the country's last blast furnace went cold for good in 1997, and these two were kept as a monument. You have been able to walk up them yourself since 2014. There is a university round them now. It was louder before.
02
Stop two
Hôtel de Ville d'Esch-sur-Alzette
Luxilon ALU Power Rough 16L Tennis String Set: Isidore Engler, local man, Esch through and through, put this up between 1935 and 1937, and I will say he was pleasant about the whole business. The sculpture is by the best Luxembourg artists going at the time. Now look at what the reliefs choose to boast about: industry, science, sport, public education, town planning, electricity, metalworking. That is a steel town writing its own reference letter. And under the tympanum, the national motto – 'Mir wölle bleiwe wat mer sin', we want to remain what we are. They meant it. I was standing roughly where you are.
03
Stop three
Église Saint-Joseph
Luxilon ALU Power Rough 16L Tennis String Set: Competition year, 1872. Charles Arendt took first prize with the neo-Gothic drawings and they built it between 1873 and 1877, and yes, it is far too big for the street, that was rather the point – the iron works were filling this town faster than anyone could count heads. Dedicated to Saint Joseph, patron of workers. Obviously. From 1881 Alphonse-Pierre Kemp carried on inside, doing the altars and nearly all the glass, made up in Trier and Munich. Charles was insufferable about that glass. National monument since 1992, which he would have enjoyed enormously.
04
Stop four
Gaalgebierg Park
Luxilon ALU Power Rough 16L Tennis String Set: Up here is Gaalgebierg, the town's main green space, laid out on the height so you look down on the works, and people walked here then and they walk here now, which is rarer than you would think. Getting up was always the problem, mind. The valley sat in the way until 2009, when somebody finally built the walkway straight across from the town centre. Sensible. Took them long enough. The hill also carries the campsite and the small free zoo. The trees were shorter. Everything else, honestly, is better now.
Sixteen-L. 1.25 mm. Silver. ALU Power is the firm co-polymer monofilament that has been under the tour's fingernails for two decades, and Rough is that same string with its surface deliberately dented — a textured skin that catches the ball rather than letting it slide across. Same power, same control, more bite.
Forty feet — 12.2 m — to the set. The playtest numbers Tennis Warehouse publishes for it run 10 for power, 10 for control, 9 for comfort and 8 for durability, which is about as flattering a line as a firm poly ever gets. And one instruction comes from Luxilon itself that people ignore constantly: drop your reference tension by at least ten per cent. This string is stiff.
Stringing it at your synthetic-gut number is how arms get sore, and no amount of good lighting fixes an elbow. Used properly it holds up everywhere from a fast indoor hard court to a heavy, slow autumn clay session, which is the whole spread of a Luxembourg season in one set.
Esch-sur-Alzette gets the texture joke immediately. Luxembourg's second city was built on iron ore found in the 1850s and on ARBED, the steel company founded here in 1911, and the country's last blast furnace at Belval went cold in 1997. The two that remain now stand over a university campus, floodlit, climbable, and entirely unapologetic about being rusted.
A rough surface that grips is the local aesthetic. So is taking something heavy and industrial and turning it into the thing everyone queues to photograph — which is more or less what happened to this city when it was named a European Capital of Culture in 2022.
And by the way, it is also perfect for the long walk down the rue de l'Alzette, the longest shopping street in the country, which is where Esch goes when it is not at the Rockhal. Silver reads well against all that steel.
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