Somain exists because of the railway. Several lines meet here, and the town grew up around the station, which still has the busy feel of a junction. The Cités de Beaurepaire were built by the Aniche mining company, one of the great concerns of the northern coalfield, and they show how a company could shape a landscape: neat brick rows, small squares, a few shared buildings, and gardens laid out to a plan. A local will tell you who lived in which house and which families still do; an outsider notices the symmetry first, and then the small signs of individuality, a painted door, a trellis, a satellite dish pointing the wrong way.
The Aniche company reached back to the eighteenth century and sank pits across the country between Douai and Valenciennes. Miners' lives were hard, and the strikes that shook the coalfield in the nineteenth century are well remembered. Nearby, old slag heaps have turned green with birch and gorse, and some have paths with views across the plain. The area has a strong tradition of brass bands, pigeon racing and cycling, and you will see pigeon lofts in the backyards.
Wind is the main fact of life on a bike here, since the plain is wide and open and there is nothing to break a crosswind, not a hedge, not a hill, only the odd line of poplars and the shoulder of a terril. Pick your day carefully and a ride here is calm and easy; pick badly and you spend it leaning at an angle. Roads are generally decent but bumpy where old workings have sunk, and the cobbles on older streets turn to glass in the wet. Sunday mornings are quiet, and the low light on the brick is lovely.
Somain has twelve thousand-odd inhabitants, so supermarkets, bakeries and fuel are all at hand. Douai, a short run west, has a fine belfry and a lively old centre. The region eats plainly and well: carbonnade flamande, potjevleesch and sugar tart. In autumn the beet harvest drags mud onto the tarmac, and in spring the fields glow yellow with rapeseed.