Where France turns Flemish — ornate brick squares, Europe's biggest flea market, and moules-frites under grey northern skies.
Lille began as a river-island trading post — its name comes from "l'île," the island — and grew rich weaving Flemish cloth. For centuries it changed hands between the counts of Flanders, the dukes of Burgundy and the Spanish crown, until the armies of Louis XIV, France's Sun King, took it in 1667 and made it French; his engineer Vauban then ringed it with a star-shaped citadel. Coal and textiles later made it an industrial giant, and fast trains turned it into a crossroads of northern Europe. Today its ornate brick-and-stone squares still wear that Flemish past.
Stand in the middle of the Grand'Place, the city's beating heart, and the finest thing on it is the Vieille Bourse — the Old Exchange, built in 1652–53 when Lille was still a prize of the Spanish Netherlands. It is not one building but twenty-four near-identical merchant houses packed shoulder to shoulder around a hidden inner courtyard, every inch of stone carved with garlands, masks and fruit. Where cloth traders once struck deals, second-hand book sellers now lay out their stalls, chess players hunch over boards, and on summer evenings couples dance tango between the arcades.
Once a year the whole city empties its attics. On the first weekend of September the Braderie de Lille — said to date back to the Middle Ages, when servants were let loose to sell their masters' cast-offs for a day — swells into the largest flea market in Europe, drawing a couple of million bargain-hunters. Tradition demands you eat moules-frites, mussels and fries, and each restaurant piles the empty shells into a towering heap on the pavement, neighbours quietly competing for the tallest mound.
Lille also gave France one of its giants. Charles de Gaulle — the general who rallied Free French resistance in the Second World War and later became president — was born here in 1890, in a modest house on the rue Princesse that is now a small museum. For much of the last century Lille was a smoke-blackened factory town, and when the mills closed it might have faded. Instead, in 1994 high-speed Eurostar trains arrived, putting Paris, Brussels and London each within about ninety minutes and remaking the old border city as a lively student crossroads.
The making of Lille
The Grand'Place
The city's ornate main square, watched over by La Déesse, the goddess crowning an 1845 column that honours a defiant siege.
Vieille Bourse
A Flemish-Baroque jewel of 24 carved merchant houses around a courtyard now full of book stalls, chess games and tango.
The Belfry
At 104 m, Europe's tallest belfry — a UNESCO-listed watchtower over the city hall, with a lift up to a rooftop panorama.
La Braderie
Europe's largest flea market takes over the streets each first weekend of September — two days of bargains, mussels and mountains of empty shells.
Charles de Gaulle
France's wartime leader and later president was born in Lille in 1890; his childhood home on the rue Princesse is now a museum.
Estaminets & Flemish flavours
Cosy northern taverns serving carbonnade — beef stewed in beer — pungent maroilles cheese, and the merveilleux, a cloud of meringue and cream.
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