Old and new: the label names two generations of company housing at Chabaud-Latour, and walking between them is a short lesson in how mining employers thought about their workers. The older cité is a grid of long brick rows, the corons of Zola's novels, packed close to the pit so that men could be at the shaft in minutes. The newer one, built later, spreads out in pairs and small groups of houses set in gardens, with wider streets and green space, part of a shift towards the garden-city ideal in the early twentieth century. Both belong to the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin World Heritage site.
These houses mattered beyond their walls. The company owned everything: the house, the school, the church, often the shop and the doctor. A miner who lost his job lost his home too, and strikes could mean eviction. At the same time, the gardens behind every house fed families, and the cités built tight communities with brass bands, pigeon racing clubs and cafés that survive to this day. Pigeon fanciers' lofts are still a common sight in back gardens around here.
The Escaut flows past nearby, canalised for barge traffic towards Valenciennes and Belgium. Denain and the towns around it were once among the most industrial in France, with steelworks and pits side by side. Today the skyline is quieter, but the scale of the old industry is still readable in the width of the rail lines, the size of the terrils and the number of brick houses stretching across the plain.
Riding around here is short-hop stuff: flat roads, lots of roundabouts, town after town merging into each other. Watch for cobbles, tram lines in Valenciennes and poorly marked speed bumps. If you want curves, the Avesnois to the south-east, with its hedges, bocage and rolling hills towards the Belgian Ardennes, is about an hour away and well worth it.
Denain, under a kilometre away, has fuel, food and shops. Valenciennes, a little further, is a lively city with a rebuilt centre, a good fine-arts museum and plenty of restaurants. Sit down in a brasserie and order a plate of andouillette or a maroilles tart, and you will be eating what the miners ate on a Sunday.