The district facing the Château across the Maine is known as La Doutre (literally, "the other side"), and still has a few mansions and houses dating from the medieval period, despite redevelopment over the years.In the north of the area, a short way from the Pont de la Haute-Chaine (about 20 minutes' walk from the château), the Hôpital St-Jean, at 4 bd Arago, was built by Henry Plantagenet in 1174 as a hospital for the poor, a function it continued to fulfil until 1854. Today it houses the Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine (mid-June to mid-Sept daily 9.30am–6.30pm; mid-Sept to mid-June Tues–Sun 10am–noon & 2–6pm; €3.50), which contains the city's great twentieth-century tapestry, Le Chant du Monde. The tapestry sequence was designed by Jean Lurçat in 1957 in response to the Apocalypse tapestry, though he died nine years later before its completion (the artist's own commentary is available in English). It hangs in a vast vaulted space, the original ward for the sick, or Salle des Malades. The first four tapestries deal with La Grande Menace, the threat of nuclear war: first the bomb itself; then Hiroshima Man, flayed and burnt with the broken symbols of belief dropping from him; then the collective massacre of the Great Charnel House; and the last dying rose falling with the post-Holocaust ash through black space – the End of Everything. From then on, the tapestries celebrate the joys of life: Man in Glory in Peace; Water and Fire; Champagne – "that blissful ejaculation", according to Lurçat; Conquest of Space; Poetry; and Sacred Ornaments. Modern tapestry is an unfamiliar art, and at first Lurçat's use of stark, bright colours on a heavy black ground can be overwhelming – or even uncomfortably reminiscent of a heavy metal T-shirt. The symbolism may be heavy-handed, but the subject matter and its treatment is certainly intense. The setting helps: it's a huge echoey space, with rows of columns supporting soaring Angevin vaulting. The Romanesque cloisters at the back, with their graceful double columns, are also worth a peek. There are more modern tapestries in the building adjoining the Salle des Malades, where the collection is built up around the donation by Lurçat's widow of several of his paintings, ceramics and tapestries, along with the highly tactile but more muted abstract tapestries of Thomas Gleb, who died in Angers in 1991. With four local ateliers, Angers is a leading centre for contemporary tapestry, and the neighbouring Centre Régional d'Art Textile, 3 bd Daviers (Mon–Fri 10am–noon & 2–4pm), can put you in touch with local artists and let you know where to find private exhibitions. South of the Hôpital St-Jean, on La Doutre's central square, place de la Laiterie, the ancient buildings of the Abbaye de Ronceray are now occupied by one of France's elite grandes écoles, the École des Arts et Métiers, which trains the leading students of aerospace technology, among others. The abbey church is used to mount art exhibitions, worth visiting just to see the Romanesque galleries of the old abbey and admire their beautiful murals. When there's no exhibition, you can only visit as part of the tourist office's weekly tour of La Doutre. Inside the adjacent twelfth-century church of the Trinity, on the square, an exquisite Renaissance wooden spiral staircase fails to mask a great piece of medieval bodging used to fit the wall of the church around a part of the abbey that juts into it.
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