The coal companies were not short of optimism when they named their housing. In Bruay-la-Buissière, two neighbouring cités were called the New World and the Flowers, and their brick houses with front gardens, laid out along tidy streets, were meant to sell a better life to the families who came from across France, Poland, Italy and North Africa to work the pits. They belong to the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin World Heritage Site, and they remain ordinary homes, so look respectfully.
Bruay turned from a village into a town of tens of thousands in a few decades of coal, and in the 1930s the municipality built itself a sports park and an open-air swimming pool to match its ambitions. The Piscine Caneton is an Art Deco gem, all white curves, tiled basins and stepped terraces, restored in recent years and used again by local people in summer. Seeing it on a hot afternoon, full of children, you understand what such a place meant to families who spent their days underground or waiting for someone who was.
The landscape around shifts quickly. To the east is the dense ribbon of mining towns; to the west and south, the chalk hills of Artois open out into farmland, beech woods and small villages. Houdain, almost next door, is an old market town with a church and a long past before coal. The slag heaps around Bruay have been colonised by birch, heather and orchids, and some are now nature reserves.
Riding through the basin itself is stop and start, with roundabouts, speed bumps and patches of pavé. The pleasure is in the lanes to the west and south, and the run to Arras, about forty minutes away, where the two vast arcaded squares and the town hall belfry rebuilt after the First World War make one of the finest urban sights in northern France.
Bruay-la-Buissière has fuel, supermarkets and garages. A friterie lunch, chips with a hot sauce and a fricadelle, or a plate of carbonnade in a café, is how the town feeds itself. The pool, if it is open when you pass, is the most unexpected swim of the trip.