Arras
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Arras

ARRAS, with its fine old centre, is one of the prettiest towns in northern France. It was renowned for its tapestries in the Middle Ages, giving its name to the hangings behind which Shakespeare's Polonius was killed by Hamlet. Subsequently the town fell under Spanish control, and many of its citizens today claim that Spanish blood runs in their veins. Only in 1654 was Arras returned to the kingdom of France. Searching for a Arras hotel, this website has a lot of choise.

Although almost destroyed in World War I, the town bears few obvious battle scars. Reconstruction here, particularly after the last war, has been careful and stylish, and two grand arcaded squares in the centre – Grand' Place and the smaller place des Héros – preserve their historic, harmonious character. On every side are restored seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions, built in relatively restrained Flemish style, and, on place des Héros, there's a grandly ornate Hôtel de Ville, its entrance hall housing a permanent photographic display documenting the wartime destruction of the town and sheltering a set of géants (festival giants) awaiting the city's next fête.

Also inside the town hall is the entrance to the belfry viewing platform (approximately three visits per day, depending on demand, starting from the tourist office; €2.30) and les souterrains (or les boves) – cold, dark passageways and spacious vaults tunnelled since the Middle Ages beneath the centre of the city (May–Sept Mon–Sat 9am–6.30pm, Sun 10am–1pm & 2.30–6.30pm; Oct–April Mon–Sat 9am–noon & 2–6pm, Sun 10am–12.30pm & 3–6.30pm; €3.80). Once down, you're escorted around an impressive area and given an interesting survey of local history. During World War I, the rooms – many of which have fine, tiled floors and lovely pillars and stairways – were used as a British barracks and hospital.

Next to its enormous cathedral is Arras's other main sight, the Benedictine Abbaye St-Vaast, a grey-stone classical building – still pockmarked by world war shrapnel – erected in the eighteenth century by Cardinal Rohen. The abbey now houses the Musée des Beaux-Arts, with its entrance at 22 rue Paul-Donnier (Wed & Fri–Mon 9.30am–noon & 2–5.30pm, Thurs 9.30am–5.30pm; €4), which contains a motley collection of paintings, including a couple of Jordaens and Brueghels, fragments of sculpture and local porcelain. Only one of the tapestries or arras that made the town famous in medieval times survived the world war bombardments. Figuring among the highlights are a pair of delicately sculpted thirteenth-century angels, the Anges de Saudemont, and a room on the first floor filled with vivid seventeenth-century paintings by Philippe de Champaigne and his contemporaries, including his own Présentation de la Vierge au Temple.

Thirty minutes away by foot on the mournful western edge of town, along boulevard Général de Gaulle from the Vauban barracks ("Citadelle" – now the regional traffic police HQ), is a war cemetery and memorial by the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. It's a movingly elegiac, classical colonnade of ivy-covered brick and stone, commemorating 35,928 missing soldiers, the endless columns of their names inscribed on the walls. Around the back of barracks, alongside an overgrown moat, is the Mémorial des Fusillés, a stark wall accessed via the avenue of the same name; its plaques commemorate two hundred Resistance fighters shot by firing squad in World War II – many of them of Polish descent, nearly all of them miners, and most of them Communists.