Brick terraced houses, small gardens and a straight street running toward the Escaut: at first glance the Cité du Rivage in Bruay-sur-l'Escaut looks like any working-class neighbourhood in northern France. It is part of something much larger. In 2012, UNESCO listed the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin, a landscape of pit villages, headframes, slag heaps and railways stretching over a hundred kilometres, as a monument to three centuries of coal. This cité is one of its many fragments, an early housing development built by the mining companies to keep their workers close to the pits.
The history here is old by coalfield standards. The Compagnie des mines d'Anzin, based just next door, was founded in the eighteenth century and became one of the most powerful industrial companies in France. Émile Zola studied the region's mines and the great strike of 1884 at Anzin before writing Germinal, his novel of miners' lives and revolt. Walk along these streets and imagine the long rows of houses filled with families whose lives revolved around the pit, the shift whistle and the company store.
The Escaut, called the Scheldt further downstream in Belgium, runs through the town, canalised and lined with old industrial sites. The landscape is flat and urban, with Valenciennes a few kilometres away and the forest of Raismes-Saint-Amand to the west, a large green island in the middle of the former coalfield. Riding here is not about curves: it is about urban roads, roundabouts, cobbled sections in old streets and traffic around Valenciennes. The rewards are elsewhere, in the history and in the sense of a region reinventing itself.
Fuel, food and services are everywhere. The local cooking is northern and generous: carbonnade flamande, beef braised in beer, potjevleesch, a cold terrine of mixed meats in jelly, waffles and fries. Local beers are excellent but best kept for the evening. If you are following the mining heritage trail, Valenciennes makes a good base, with hotels, a lively centre and a museum of fine arts. As for the cité, take a slow ride or walk along its streets and look at the details: the brick patterns, the identical doors, the gardens that now bloom where miners once grew vegetables to make ends meet.