Lille is a Flemish city that happens to be in France, and its brick and gables show it. The Grand'Place, with its tall merchants' houses and a theatre that looks like a wedding cake, is the centre of a lively old town of cobbled streets, and the nearby Vieille Bourse, the old stock exchange, is a courtyard of carved stone where secondhand-book sellers set out their stalls. The citadel, built by Vauban for Louis XIV, still stands to the west, a star-shaped fortress inside a park.
The city is also a place for eating. Moules-frites, mussels with chips, are the regional classic, as are carbonnade, a beer-braised beef stew, and waffles filled with sweet vanilla sugar. Each year in early September the whole city turns out for the Braderie de Lille, an enormous flea market that spreads over dozens of streets, and the mound of mussel shells outside the restaurants becomes a competition. If you plan to ride around that weekend, expect closures and crowds.
Lille has some 228,000 people, and fuel and parking are straightforward at the edge, with the ring roads giving access to Belgium, which lies only a few kilometres away. The centre is dense, with tram lines, one-way streets and cobbles that become slick when wet. Park outside and walk, or leave the bike at a secure garage. The countryside around is flat, with long straight roads across fields of sugar beet and wheat, and small canals and brick villages, and it is not a landscape for dramatic corners. But there are pleasures in the wind, the wide sky, and the old battlefields that lie to the south.
Winters are grey, wet and cold, and summers mild, so pack for rain whenever you come. Then, as the lights come on in the Grand'Place, with a beer in hand, the city makes a good case for itself.