Cobbled streets, cosy bars and cultural gems in Lille's old centre

Unfairly overlooked, regarded merely as a train stop on route to Brussels, Lille has much to recommend it: some of the best museums in the Hauts-de-France region, an attractive cobbled historic centre, and a dynamic student population along with cosy bars, hearty meals, micro-breweries, leafy parks, and a wide range of festivals.

Add affordable property, and increasing employment opportunities to the mix, and it really is a destination worth visiting or even moving to. 

Lille is joyously cultural; theatres and performance spaces include the Théâtre Sebastopol, the Nouveau Siècle, the Thèâtre du Nord, L'Aeronef, the Opéra de Lille, La Boite à Rire, as well as big arenas and even the English Stand-up Comedy Club at Le Spotlight. (There are also English, Irish and Scottish pubs all over the city.) 

The old centre is beautiful; the cobbled streets are lined with tall narrow buildings with steeply sloping roofs and slightly crooked windows.

A Gothic cathedral

In the midst of all this the facade of the cathedral - a massive uncompromising black slab - comes as a shock. What on earth is that doing on the front of a Gothic cathedral? The Basilica of Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille is in fact Gothic Revival. 

Construction began in 1854, with grand plans to impress the world, despite insufficient funding. It was therefore built in stages, even successively less imposing than the last.

By 1975 the steam had run out completely but the cathedral still wasn't finished. It still needed a facade with two mighty towers and an ornate set of arched entrances decorated with the usual religious sculptures, gargoyles, flora and fauna. But there was no money, so the front was simply closed to the elements with a brick wall. 

In 1999, bowing to the inevitable, the 'temporary' brick facade was replaced by incongruous black marble slabs. From the inside, however, when the sun shines on it the central panel becomes illuminated by the sun. Inside the cathedral on the left hand side there is an architect's model of the original design. It is up to you to decide whether the black marble is a brave modern addition, or just plain weird.

Plenty of spots to 'wine and dine'

Lille has restaurants serving food from all over the world, and traditional estaminets serving regional specialities like welsh, poulet aux maroilles, and carbonnade (beef stew with gingerbread). Also look out for a wide range of dishes featuring melted cheese. Some of these restaurants are very old-established and the decor reflects this; cosy lighting, wooden tables and chairs, old posters on the walls. Everyone has their favourite, but I particularly liked Au Vieux de la Vielle.

Lille is too far north to be in a wine-growing area but has a positively Belgian passion for craft beers - they go so well with melted cheese and chips! To try some different beers, email via the website and reserve a tasting at Célestin, a micro-brewery in Vieux-Lille, established in 1740. The owner, Amaury d'Herbigny, is the ninth generation of his family to run the brewery and enjoys explaining how he makes the beers they sell, including one with hibiscus flowers and another with Japanese lemon. Or you can just go straight to the shop, buy a few bottles, and organise your own tasting. 

Work all that off with a walk down to the Place Roger Salengro to visit the Beffroi de Lille.

You'll need to continue on Shanks' Pony for the first 100 stairs up the tower, but after that there is an antique but serviceable lift to crank you up to the indoor viewing platform.

A further short flight of stairs leads to the outdoor platform above, where the view is obstructed by chicken wire - presumably a security measure. The panoramas of the old town, the modern high-rise buildings, the sports stadiums and churches are comprehensively annotated on the accompanying maps.

Magnificent museums

The Palais des Beaux-Arts, under the direction of Juliette Singer, is probably the city's biggest attraction, drawing 300,000 visitors per year. The building itself is a stand-out beauty, constructed in 1889-1892 literally as a palace for culture and the arts. 

The permanent exhibitions on the ground floor are free to visit, and the current installation by Felice Varini is amusing as well as clever. Red circles, blue flashes of lightning, and a black grille pierced with holes appear to hover over the stonework. At the moment the works are scheduled to be removed in June 2026, but there are already calls to make the works a permanent feature.

"It is important to change things around, to keep the displays fresh," says Ms Singer. 

"In the same way, it is important to mount exhibitions which engage children, and encourage them to form a lifelong habit of visiting museums. This is why we have opened a special circular gallery for them, the free 'Children's Museum' containing interesting things they can see and touch and do. Gender inclusion is obviously also important, and from October 2026 to March 2027 we will mount the museum's first atrium exhibition by a female artist. It really isn't normal that no woman artist has previously exhibited in this space." 

Another highlight will be an exhibition of around 80 works by William Turner lent by Tate Britain. Voyage à l'Anglaise will look at how travel to Europe influenced British landscape painting, and is expected to draw big crowds.

Another  beautiful museum is La Piscine (aka Le Musée d'Art et d'Industrie André Diligent) in Roubaix, which as the name suggests, is housed in a converted swimming pool. 

The complex was originally constructed in 1932 by the socialist mayor of Roubaix, Jean-Baptiste Lebas, who wanted to provide the town's textile workers with public baths but realised that although they would swim in the dirty waters of the canal, they would find it humiliating to be seen going to a public bath house. He therefore constructed an Art Déco swimming pool which would attract the bosses as well as their employees. 

The facilities included private changing cubicles, a laundry, a hairdressing salon, a rose garden, a courtyard solarium, a beauty salon, and steam baths as well as a 50m-long pool decorated with gold and blue mosaics, massive stained glass windows representing sunrise and sunset. 

Water poured into the shallow end of the pool through the mouth of a magnificently carved head of Poseidon, which rapidly became known as 'the Lion'. 

All this glory has been retained, although for safety reasons the pool, now lined with statues, is only 40cms deep. A poignant footnote is that Jean-Baptiste Lebas, who joined the Resistance during World War Two, died in Sonnenburg Concentration Camp in March 1944, aged 66. 

Incidentally, the restaurant is still in operation. The dining room has hardly changed since it was first built; the bar to the left side has not changed, and even the chairs and tables are the same. It is an excellent place for lunch.