Bruay-la-Buissière is a town built on coal, and the rows of brick houses that spread around it were designed to keep miners close to their pits. The Cités Anatole France and des Électriciens belong to the great mining landscape of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a basin of coalfields, slag heaps and company towns that UNESCO inscribed in 2012. Coal was mined here from the early eighteenth century until the last pit closed in 1990, and the memory of that work is still everywhere.
A cité is a planned company village: terraces of identical brick houses, each with a small garden, laid out in streets or in half-moons, with a school, a church and a shop built by the mining company. The idea was to keep families housed, healthy and obedient, and to ensure that miners lived close enough to answer the siren. The cités of Bruay have a particular orderliness, with brick in warm orange and red, steep tiled roofs and long, neat streets. If you stop and look carefully you can see that the houses vary from period to period, with later ones larger and better equipped.
The people who lived here included Frenchmen, Belgians, Italians and, after the First World War, thousands of Poles, who came to work in the pits. They called themselves gueules noires, black faces, with pride, and their culture of brass bands, pigeon racing and local football is still alive in the small towns. The region's cuisine is hearty: carbonnade, stewed in beer, frites, and strong cheeses such as Maroilles. Look for an estaminet, the old-style local pub, for a proper lunch.
Riding here is not about mountains but about atmosphere. The land is flat, apart from the great conical slag heaps, the terrils, that rise from the plain like green pyramids. Roads run straight between brick villages, with the occasional stretch of cobbles, so take care in wet weather. Light traffic is usual on Sundays, and in autumn, with mist and wet leaves, the whole landscape turns to sepia.
Bruay-la-Buissière has twenty-four thousand people, with fuel, supermarkets and many cafés. Everything you need is close.