The Walloon and Flemish Trade Office in Birmingham
The Walloon and Flemish Trade Office is back in Birmingham and the Wallonia Export Agency is celebrating this move with an exhibition of a typical Belgian art form: comic strips.
While we are one of your oldest and closest trade partners, people sometimes forget that Belgium is a lot more than beer and chocolate. We are of course proud of our reputation for good food & drink but as this exhibition will show, we have other traditions such as a long history of graphic art. Belgium offers an excellent logistics platform with quadrimodal (road, rail, air, water) inland ports and sea ports that are well connected with Britain. It has a thriving aeronautics and aerospace industry; a biomedical sector boosted by many research centres and universities and an important precision engineering sector (components, car parts, machines).
The Belgian presence in Birmingham goes back more than 50 years. After the creation of European Union, consular paperwork reduced and over the years the consulate evolved to a trade office which was originally located in the Rotunda. It moved to Newhall Street after the bomb attack in 1974 , and in the late nineties moved again to Solihull. Now we're celebrating being back in “the“ city, where the business is to found and where we, as well as an increasing number of Belgian business visitors, benefit from links to the rest of the country. It is from this base in the heart of industrial England that the Trade Office wishes to improve the relationships between the United Kingdom and Belgium.
Foreign Trade Promotion devolved to the Belgian Regions of Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels in 1995 when the government of Wallonia took over the office. To improve efficiency, in 2005 Wallonia and Flanders signed an agreement to join forces. The Trade Office is one of the rare diplomatic delegations in Birmingham with a full time staff, an indication of how important we consider the Midlands and the North of England to be.
Mr Frank F. Compernolle has been the Economic and Commercial Attaché since 2004.
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