Lille: Northern Star
Lille takes nearly everyone, French and foreign, by surprise. Expecting a chilly, gray northern city, visitors find instead a lively metropolis filled with colorful, architecturally exuberant buildings and welcoming public squares large and small filled with Lillois so friendly and fun loving that a party atmosphere pervades the city.
Ask a bus driver how to get to a museum and several passengers jump in with helpful tips; we ended up with detailed directions and big waves from everyone, including the driver, when we got off. A question about a restaurant’s name (Le Barbue d’Anvers), sends our cheerful young waiter straight to a nearby shelf, where he pages through a book and smilingly presents us with a full-page colored engraving of a handsome bantam chicken of the Barbue d’Anvers breed.
The recent surprise hit film, Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis, in which a disgraced postal employee is forced to relocate from Provence to a small town near Lille—”the North Pole”, declares his wife—only to be won over by loveable locals, not only broke all attendance records for a French film, but also kicked off a sizeable rise in tourism to the whole northern area.
Lille has plenty to celebrate these days—chiefly, a dramatic comeback after decades of decline. Located in Flanders, a historic Franco-Belgian area where both French and Flemish are still spoken, Lille, thanks to its central position in a network of trade routes and waterways, prospered from the Middle Ages as a thriving market town. Its name, originally Isla, from the Latin insula, or island—L’Isle in French—first appears in 1066 to describe the residence of Baudoin V, count of Flanders and owner of a château on an island in the Deûle River. Under the powerful Flemish counts, Flanders had closer economic ties to England and the Holy Roman Empire than to France. After passing by marriage through the hands of the Burgundians, Hapsburgs and Spanish, the region was claimed for France by Louis XIV in 1667 after a 9-day siege.
After the French Revolution Lille was taken over by an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, which by the 19th century had transformed the city into a formidable industrial power. As the wealthy capital of northern France, Lille’s fortunes rested first on bustling textile mills (cotton and linen) and coal mines; later it added steel mills and chemical companies. But the arrival of synthetic fabrics and foreign competition, coupled with dwindling coal deposits, started a downward spiral that hit the city hard. Mills and mines closed, the unemployment rate soared from 3% in 1975 to 13% in 1990 and, with the loss of those thousands of jobs, parts of Lille became empty, dilapidated and seedy.
Fortunately, preservationists had started rescuing the historic city center in the 1960s, chipping away the stucco that masked its distinctive brick-and-carved-stone facades. High-end shops and restaurants began moving into the colorful 17th- and 18th-century houses, and the arrival of the TGV high speed train in 1993 spurred further growth. With the European Union’s Brussels headquarters only 40 minutes away, foreign companies found Lille an ideal location for offices and investment. During its stint as the European Cultural Capital in 2004, Lille spent some €73 million—the largest sum ever for a single cultural operation in France—and invested another €55 million to spruce up the city.
Today the city has never looked better. Since the TGV whisks visitors from Paris’s Gare du Nord to Lille in a short, comfortable hour, the city is accessible even as a day trip from the capital. But with its wealth of hotels and restaurants in all price ranges, and several fascinating museums, Lille is well worth a longer stay.
Any visit should start with the three places linked at the center of Vieux Lille. The Place du Théâtre is dominated by two early 19th-century buildings, the ornate Opera House and the imposing Chamber of Commerce building, also called the Nouvelle Bourse, whose belfry, 249 feet tall, is a useful landmark. Facing it, the Rang du Beauregard is a row of lovely brick-and-stone buildings adorned with cartouches, cornucopias and putti, a great introduction to the exuberance of Lille architecture in the 17th century.
But the heart and soul of Vieux Lille is the next square, a vast and lively meeting place officially called the Place du Général de Gaulle but known by all as the Grand’Place. Always the city’s most important gathering place, this was the market square when the town was born. At its center stands a column supporting the Déesse, the statue of a goddess commemorating the siege of the city by the Austrians in 1792. Locals mingle with tourists in the square’s many cafes. The other buildings ringing the place, while an eclectic assortment, present nonetheless a harmonious panorama of Lille architecture from the 17th to the 20th century.
A striking white building with a Flemish step-gabled facade is headquarters for the regional newspaper La Voix du Nord. Dating from the mid-1930s, the building is topped by three Graces in gilded bronze. Perpendicular to it, facing the goddess, is Le Furet du Nord, a nine-story bookstore that’s one of the largest in Europe.
The jewel of the Grand’Place, and Lille’s most beautiful monument, is the Vieille Bourse, or Old Stock Exchange, built in 1653 to house merchants and financiers. A quadrangle with a uniform facade surrounding an arcaded courtyard, the Bourse is sculpted inside and out with polychrome atlases and caryatids, flower garlands, fruits and cartouches, a perfect example of the Flemish Renaissance style. Today the building houses shops and restaurants, while the courtyard holds used book stalls or, at times, chess players.
A smaller square off the Grand’Place, the Place Rihour is home to the Office de Tourisme, handsomely lodged in a 15th-century Flamboyant Gothic chapel, one of the few vestiges of the palace of the Dukes of Burgundy. Here you’ll find all the maps and information you’ll need to continue your exploration of the cobbled streets of the surprisingly extensive Vieux Lille.
The rue des Chats-Bossus (Street of the Humpbacked Cats, named for an old tannery sign) boasts La Huitrière, an elegant one-star restaurant in the off-beat setting of an Art Deco poissonnerie (fish market). On the nearby rue de la Monnaie, lined with 18th-century houses in Italianate shades of yellow and ochre, stands the Hospice Comtesse, a 13th-century pauper’s hospital. Now a museum of regional history, it displays fine examples of Flemish and Dutch furniture and paintings, walls covered with hand-painted Delft tiles, and curiosities including pharmaceutical jars and laundry presses.
The Place aux Onions, named not for the vegetable but for a donjon, or keep, that once stood here, is a pretty square with several restaurants including a lively estaminet, Au Vieux de la Vieille, whose ceiling is covered with dried hops. Originally cafés where locals came for drinks and music, today’s estaminets are rustic, casual restaurants serving regional specialties and a wide range of beers; they’re inexpensive and great fun. The rue de Gand, a former red-light district, is now a cobbled street lined with restored houses, estaminets and other eating places, leading to a chic restaurant, La Terrasse des Remparts, perched atop the Porte de Gand, a gate that’s a vestige of the vanished city walls.
An institution in Vieux Lille, the Meert (pronounced mare) pâtisserie on rue Esquermoise, founded in 1761, is best known for its vanilla-cream-filled gaufre, a very thin, flat waffle. Meert’s tea salon, a gorgeous 19th-century confection glittering with mirrors, chandeliers and wrought-iron balconies, is a perfect spot to stop for a sweet and a coffee, or one of the 50 blends of tea on offer.
Outside Vieux Lille, the Palais des Beaux-Arts, still glowing from a six-year renovation, boasts a huge collection including ceramics, sculptures and European paintings (including Rubens’s masterpiece, The Descent from the Cross), beautifully presented against walls colored crimson and taupe. The vaulted red-brick lower level holds medieval and Renaissance treasures, with ivories, reliquaries, wood carvings and some exquisite altarpieces—notably a superb 15th-century Tyrolean example dedicated to St. George.
History buffs will enjoy visiting the birthplace of Charles de Gaulle, the home of his grandparents, where the future president was born in 1890. The museum traces his career with photos and memorabilia—baby Charles’s christening gown, embroidered by his mother; his sword from the St. Cyr military academy—while the house itself gives visitors a glimpse into the everyday life of an affluent Lille family in the late 19th century.
A pleasant way to wind down from a day of sightseeing is by returning to the Grand’Place for an aperitif. Try one of the local favorites—a Picon Bière (beer spiked with Picon, a bitter orange liqueur); a ruby-colored Kriek (beer brewed with cherries); or a chuche-mourette, a kir laced with crème de cassis and genièvre, a juniper-berry liqueur. Relax amid the laughter from surrounding tables, watch the sunset touch the brick facades with rosy light, and raise your glass to France’s northern star.
LILLE NOTEBOOK
Office de Tourisme Place Rihour. website
HOTELS
Hôtel Brueghel 3 parvis Saint Maurice, 03.20.06.06.69. A simple, well-located hotel appealingly decorated with flea market finds. website
L’Hermitage Gantois 224 rue de Paris, 03.20.85.30.30. A luxurious hotel in a 15th-century hospice and cloister. website
Couvent des Minimes/Alliance Lille 17 quai du Wault, 03.20.30.62.62. Luxury hotel in a former convent and cloister. Doubles from €215. website
RESTAURANTS
Aux Moules 34 rue de Béthune, 03.20.57.12.46. A colorful 1930s brasserie whose specialty is mussels in a multitude of sauces. website
L’Ecume des Mers 10 rue de Pas, 03.20.54.95.40. A two-level seafood restaurant with a lively buzz and a daily-changing menu. website
La Huitrière 3 rue des Chats Bossus, 03.20.55.43.41. An elegant seafood restaurant within an astonishing Art Deco fish market, run by the same family since 1928, with a Michelin star since 1930. website
Restaurant Clément Marot 16 rue de Pas, 03.20.57.01.10. The affable Monsieur Marot offers a good-value prix-fixe menu of well-prepared French fare. website
La Terrasse des Remparts Rue de Gand, Logis de la Porte de Gand, 03.20.06.74.74. A stylish restaurant atop an old city gate, serving modern versions of traditional dishes. website
ESTAMINETS
Au Vieux de la Vieille, 2 rue des Vieux Murs, Place aux Onions, 03.20.13.81.64. website
Chez la Vieille 60 rue de Gand, 03.28.36.40.06. Same owners and menu as Au Vieux de la Vieille. website
Le Barbue d’Anvers, 1 bis rue Saint Etienne, 03.20.55.11.68. website
‘T Rijsel, 25 rue de Gand, 03.20.15.01.59. website
MUSEUMS
Hospice Comtesse 32 rue de la Monnaie, 03.28.36.84.00
Palais des Beaux-Arts Place de la République, 03.20.06.78.00. website
Charles de Gaulle Birthplace 9 rue Princesse, 03.28.38.12.05. website
OTHER
La Part des Anges 50 rue de la Monnaie, 03.20.06.44.01. In the stronghold of beer, a welcoming little wine bar.
Pâtisserie Meert 27 rue Esquermoise, 03.20.57.07.44. A beautiful pastry shop/tea salon that’s a Lille institution. website
L’Abbaye des Saveurs 13 rue des Vieux Murs, 03.28.07.70.06. A friendly shop carrying local beers, liqueurs, cheeses and other regional products. website
Originally published in the October 2008 issue of France Today; updated in January 2012
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