Mazingarbe is a small town on the northern edge of the mining basin, with the terraced rows of a miners' cité running down streets of red brick, and nearly twelve thousand people live in neighbouring Bully-les-Mines. The Cité Foch and the Cité Bellevue are two of the estates that mark this stretch of the basin on the map. The cité, built by the coal company for its workers, usually came with a school, a church, a company shop and a community hall, so that the pit shaped a whole life.
The company that worked here also built a large chemical plant at Mazingarbe, which turned coal into gas, fertiliser and other products, and the town was industrial as well as mining. In the First World War the whole district was in the front line. In September 1915 the British attacked at Loos, a few kilometres north, in the first big battle where the British army used poison gas, and the fighting was fierce around the slag heaps and the pit-head frames of the mines. The cemeteries around Loos are among the largest British cemeteries of the war, with long white rows of headstones, and the memorial lists the names of many men with no known grave. Anyone who rides through the area will pass them in the fields without warning.
The terrain is flat and open, and the roads between Mazingarbe, Bully and Sains-en-Gohelle are straight and fast, crossing old railway lines and canals, and passing beneath slag heaps that are now grown over with trees. Old cobbled lanes survive between the villages and can be treacherous when wet, and the traffic is steady around Lens and Béthune at rush hour. The best rides are at the weekend, in spring or autumn, when the light is clear and the fields green or golden.
Mazingarbe has seven and a half thousand people and enough shops and fuel for a short break. Bully-les-Mines and the larger towns around have more choice. Local specialities are plain and hearty: a plate of frites, a pot of mussels near the coast, and the strong, spicy maroilles cheese. Try the welsh, a regional dish of bread and cheese baked in beer, if you are cold. A warm drink is easy to find, and the people in the cafes are friendly to travellers who stop and ask about the area.