Ghent in a weekend: the Flemish city that gets everything Bruges has, with half the coach parties

Everyone who goes to Ghent says the same thing on the way home, which is that they should have gone sooner and stayed longer. It is 35 minutes from Brussels by train, which puts it within three and a half hours of London, and it has what Bruges has (canals, gabled merchant houses, a belfry, a van Eyck altarpiece) in a city of 270,000 people that is too busy being a university town to bother much with tourists.

I arrived on a Friday evening in early October, having left St Pancras at 12.58pm and changed at Brussels Midi, and was sitting outside a bar on the Graslei by 5.30pm with a glass of Gruut, the local beer brewed with herbs rather than hops (£4.20). The Graslei and its twin across the water, the Korenlei, are the picture-postcard stretch: two quays of 12th- to 17th-century guildhouses reflected in the river Leie, and in autumn, with the trees turning and the light low, they are hard to improve on.

Saturday I spent doing the things one is supposed to do, which are worth doing. The Ghent altarpiece, the 1432 van Eyck polyptych in St Bavo’s cathedral, is the big draw; book a timed slot (£13.50) for 9am and you will have the chapel almost to yourself for 20 minutes before the groups arrive. The belfry (£10) has a lift most of the way and the view from the top takes in all three of the city’s towers in a row. And the 40-minute canal boat (£9), which leaves from the Korenlei every half hour, is cheesy and brilliant and the only way to see the back of the Gravensteen, the 12th-century castle that squats in the middle of town like a stone toad.

But the better part of the weekend was the bit with no plan. Ghent has a vast pedestrianised centre and it is a city for wandering: through the Patershol, a knot of medieval lanes north of the castle now full of small restaurants; along the Vrijdagmarkt, where there is a Friday morning market; across the river to the street-art alley on Werregarenstraat, where the walls are repainted weekly. A cone of frites with stoofvleessaus, the beef-and-beer stew the Flemish pour over chips, from a stand on the Vrijdagmarkt cost £5 and kept me going until dark.

Ghent eats well and cheaply. At De Superette, a bakery-restaurant in a former corner shop, a Saturday lunch of wood-fired flatbread with mushrooms and a glass of wine was £19. For dinner I went to a place called Mastelle in the Patershol, where the waterzooi, Ghent’s own creamy chicken stew, came in a bowl large enough to wash in (£22). Both nights ended in beer cafes: ’t Dreupelkot, a bar that serves 200 kinds of jenever, and the Trollekelder, where a Westmalle Dubbel comes with a warning about the stairs.

I stayed at a small hotel in a 19th-century townhouse on the Coupure canal, 10 minutes from the centre, at £112 a night including a breakfast of excellent bread and worse coffee. Train fares from London, booked six weeks ahead, were £98 return including the connection. The whole weekend, Friday evening to Sunday night, came to about £420.

Sunday morning I did the one thing the guidebooks do not mention, which is to walk out along the Coupure to the Citadelpark and the city’s art museum, MSK, which has a Bosch and a Magritte and almost no visitors. Then the 3.10pm train from Sint-Pieters, and London by 7pm. I should have stayed longer.