Libercourt is a young town by French standards. It grew in the early twentieth century around a coal company's pits and a railway line, on land that had been farm and marsh, and the planners laid it out from scratch, with straight streets, a station and cités of brick cottages in tidy rows. Many of the miners who filled them came from Poland, recruited in large numbers between the wars, and Polish names, church services and recipes marked the mining villages of the north for generations.
Oignies lies next door, with its great pit and concert hall, so you can pair the two in an afternoon. The pit's headframes make a good counterpoint to the quiet streets of Libercourt, where a surprising amount of green has crept in: allotments, birch groves on old slag, and a canal edged with poplars. A few kilometres to the north lies Lille, the biggest city of the region, with a Flemish-looking Grand Place and a famous street market, the Braderie, in early September, when the whole centre fills with stalls and people eat mussels and chips.
The riding is flat, with long straight roads through the plain and numerous roundabouts. Be careful of cobbles on side roads and of wet tramlines near the railway. Traffic is brisk around the A1 motorway and the Lille-Lens axis, but small roads between villages are quiet. Spring and autumn are the most pleasant seasons. In winter the fog on the plain can be thick, and a low sun in the evening gives the brick a deep red colour.
Libercourt has about eight thousand people, and the neighbouring towns are of a similar size, so fuel and food are not a problem. A baker or a frituur will do for lunch, and Lille is only twenty kilometres or so away for anything bigger. Take a walk through the cité streets and look at the doors and the gardens. People still grow beans and leeks in the back plots, as the miners did.