Houdain is a mining town in the Pas-de-Calais, a couple of kilometres from Bruay and a short hop from Béthune, and its workers' estates carry names that read like a municipal promise: Victory and Trees. They belong to the western end of the northern French coalfield, which stretches in a long band across the Nord and Pas-de-Calais and which was the engine of the region for more than two centuries. Here the company built housing on a scale that still surprises. Whole districts of identical brick houses, each with its own garden plot, were laid out in rows and crescents, so that miners and their families would live close to the pit and under the eye of their employer.
What strikes you today is how tidy and human the streets feel. The brick has aged to a soft orange, front gardens are packed with dahlias and vegetable rows, and mature trees line the avenues. It is easy to forget that this was a controlled system of work and housing, with rents, rules and often a company school and church. The coalfield was recognised as a World Heritage landscape in 2012 precisely because these estates survive in such quantity.
Riding here means flat country with long, straight roads, chains of villages that merge into one another, and pale sky. It is not twisty, and you will pass dozens of roundabouts. The surface can be bumpy where old galleries have caused subsidence under the tarmac. A ride through the cités is a gentle, low-speed affair, best done on a quiet Sunday when nobody is about and nobody minds a motorbike idling slowly past.
Houdain itself has a couple of shops and cafes for a coffee and a baguette; fuel is available in the town and in neighbouring Bruay-la-Buissière. Look for the black pyramids of slag heaps rising above the roofs, and give them a thought. Autumn is a good season, when the brick glows against grey cloud and the trees turn, and the fields around are in clean ploughed lines.