You might think the blue-collar town of Lens, in the heart of northern France’s historic mining region, would make for an unlikely city break, the area having fallen on hard times following the closure of its pits and the loss of its defining industry.

But, as reporter Rhys Griffiths discovered on a recent trip, the town and its surrounding countryside – all little more than an hour’s drive from the Channel ports – have much to offer the visitor, from incredible art to a story rich with wartime and industrial heritage…

Standing at one end of the Gallery of Time, the centrepiece of the Louvre-Lens museum, thousands of years of human art and ingenuity stretch out before you. The huge space allows the visitor to move chronologically through time, from the 4th millennium BC to the mid 19th century, exploring more than 200 masterpieces loaned by the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Opened in 2012, the sleek, low-profile buildings constructed of glass and aluminium stand on the site of a former coal mine, where generations once toiled underground in dirty, dangerous conditions. The mines are gone now, but the challenges common to all post-industrial communities remain. Bringing the Louvre to Lens has been the most prominent attempt to write a new chapter in the town’s proud, sometimes turbulent history.

There is a sense of tension here, perhaps, with the museum being an attempt to look to the future through the celebration of the past. But it feels apt in a place where, however forward-facing you may be, history looms large in a very literal sense. If the Louvre-Lens has been designed to sit discreetly amid its surroundings, there are other landmarks here which resolutely refuse to blend into the landscape of this corner of the Pas-de-Calais.

A symbol of sacrifice

I arrived in Lens on a rainy Friday evening and, as darkness began to creep in, I took a meandering walk from my base at the Hôtel Louvre-Lens, a fabulous boutique hotel occupying converted miners’ cottages opposite the museum, into the town centre. Although the wider region is well-populated, the town itself is small – the population able to fit comfortably inside the Stade Bollaert-Delelis, home to the town’s passionately supported top-flight football club Racing Club de Lens.

After wandering this way and that in the drizzle, I ducked into the estaminet Le Pain de la Bouche, close to the railway station. I am not sure how to translate estaminet precisely, a small bar or bistro, perhaps. But it is the common description in this part of the world for homely places serving traditional, local dishes, and I dined on a hearty plate of meatballs before retiring for an early night.

The next morning I woke refreshed, and set out by bicycle to visit some of the most important First World War memorials in the countryside outside the town. I struck out through the southern edge of Lens, past rows of derelict miners’ cottages awaiting redevelopment, and on towards the village of Givenchy-en-Gohelle from where the road would climb up to Vimy Ridge.

After slogging uphill in a sudden flurry of hailstones, I reached the Canadian National Vimy Memorial and visitor centre, where I was greeted by the enthusiastic Canadian guides who are on hand to show visitors around the site and explain its symbolic importance to the people of Canada.

It was here at Vimy Ridge in April 1917 all four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, drawn from all corners of the country, fought together for the first time and captured the high ground in a successful offensive against the Germans. Such is the importance of the site to the Canadian people, that in 1922 it was granted to Canada by France in perpetuity for use as a memorial park in recognition of the sacrifice made by its troops in the First World War.

Today a succession of young Canadian volunteers come to Europe to spend a period working as guides for those who come to visit the site. Our enthusiastic guide, a history student from Alberta, took us into the tunnels and trenches which criss-cross the ridge, explaining how British mining companies of the Royal Engineers had dug extensive underground networks which allowed troops to be brought to the front unseen. After emerging into the daylight, we were shown the remains of trenches and huge craters where the barrage of artillery had displaced tonnes of earth at a time.

After stopping to contemplate the huge memorial overlooking Lens and the surrounding countryside below, I saddled up and rode on along the undulating ridge to Notre Dame de Lorette, site of the largest French military cemetery in the world. Here I was met by an excellent local guide, Delphine, who showed me around the burial grounds and inside the basilica at the centre of the cemetery.

We then crossed to a much newer memorial opposite, the Ring of Remembrance, which was inaugurated in 2014 and is engraved with the names of almost 580,000 soldiers killed in Nord-Pas-de-Calais during the 1914-1918 conflict. The memorial is made even more poignant by the fact the names are listed alphabetically, with no reference to nationality or rank. All equal in the ultimate sacrifice they made.

Earlier at Vimy Ridge the mention of the tunnelling companies had reminded me of my grandmother’s uncle, Enoch Stanley Evans, who was a sapper in one of those units tasked with digging in the French soil during the war. His name was there on the Ring of Remembrance and, looking up his Commonwealth War Graves Commission records, I then discovered he had died in January 1916 only a handful of miles away from where I stood and was buried at the Chocques Military Cemetery a short drive away.

Having come to this corner of France, it seemed inconceivable that I could leave without visiting his grave. Kindly, my contact at the local tourist board insisted we redraw our plans for the rest of the day and make the short drive to Chocques. The cemetery is small by the standards of some of those I had visited in the past, and using the registry it took only a matter of minutes to locate the headstone I was looking for.

I stood for a few moments in the shadows of the lowering afternoon sun. Suddenly the enormity of those 580,000 names, the slaughter on a scale that still defies comprehension, was reduced to the deeply personal, the intimacy of family blood shed here on foreign ground. I said a few silent words of gratitude, and headed back to Lens.

A journey through time

The next morning I rose early with plans to arrive at the Louvre-Lens museum when the doors opened. Before entering the elegant buildings housing the museum, designed by the Japanese architects of the SANAA agency, I strolled for a while in the parkland around it where dog walkers and runners were enjoying the spring morning.

After a short tour of the site from a museum guide, I was left to explore the treasures housed in the central Gallery of Time, its collection billed by the museum as “a new dialogue between eras, techniques and civilisations”.

Given the collection of the Musée du Louvre contains more than 500,000 pieces, a fraction of which are on view in Paris at any one time, it is wonderful to be able to see such a finely curated selection of works in one place. Large museums, especially those that attract millions of visitors from around the world, can be overwhelming – but at Louvre-Lens the atmosphere is relaxed, and it is easy to get close to the pieces and spend as much time as you wish exploring them in detail.

As Jean-Luc Martinez, president-director of the Musée du Louvre and curator of the Gallery of Time, has said: “In the Louvre palace, visitors can be overwhelmed by the extraordinary scale of the building and the maze of rooms. At the Louvre-Lens, however, they encounter a place where they can take in the prolific history of human creation at a glance. The Louvre-Lens thus makes it possible to see the Louvre’s collections with a fresh eye, to rediscover them even.”

The gallery itself is spectacular, 120 metres long and covering an area of 3,000 sqm, with internal walls clad in aluminium without any openings to the world beyond. The artefacts are displayed chronologically, starting with remarkable pottery, statues and carvings from antiquity. I was particularly entranced by a fragment of the decoration of the throne room of the palace of Darius I, a Persian ruler who served as the third King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, which showed winged sphinxes wearing tiaras.

Moving further through the gallery the millennia pass by, moving via the treasures of Greece and Rome towards the Middle Ages, and pieces from both Christian Europe and the Arab world. Eventually we arrive at the modern era, and the tour through time culminates on an appropriately Gallic note with Paul Delaroche’s painting of Napoleon Bonaparte Crossing the Alps.

All told, it probably took me close to an hour to slowly make my way through the gallery. There is something quite special about having such a tightly curated collection with a genuine mix of art and craft on show. If you are local to Lens, then every year there will be a fresh set of pieces to admire, as the collection in the Gallery of Time is refreshed every December on the anniversary of the museum’s opening.

Climbing the ‘mountains’ of Lens

After leaving the museum, I walked through the suburban streets of Lens for a rendezvous with Delphine, my guide who had shown me around Notre Dame de Lorette and the Ring of Remembrance the previous day. We met at the site of the mines of La Base 11/19 in the pit village of Loos-en-Gohelle on the northern edge of Lens, where two towering terrils – slag heaps of waste material from the mines – dominate the landscape.

The Nord-Pas-de-Calais Mining Basin, of which these pits were part, has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in recognition of its profound impact on the history and character of the region. “The site bears testimony to the quest to create model workers’ cities from the mid 19th century to the 1960s and further illustrates a significant period in the history of industrial Europe,” the UNESCO listing states.

Delphine makes for an excellent guide, as she herself is a one-time native of the mining villages, but although her language skills are formidable we do share a few moments of slightly baffled laughter as we battle to translate some of the more technical aspects of the mining process from French to English. We wander the streets of the Cité des Provinces mining village which was constructed on the edge of the pit to house the workforce, taking in the humble cottages for the miners and the more palatial villas which housed the senior management.

From there were head towards the terrils, which now form part of a protected landscape popular with walkers who scale the peaks of this huge black pyramids. In his hymn to the northern mining country – still sung lustily by supporters of RC Lens – French singer-songwriter Pierre Bachelet sang: “Et j'avais des terrils à défaut de montagnes, d'en haut je voyais la campagne”, roughly translated as “and I had slag heaps in the absence of mountains, from above I saw the countryside”. And you certainly can. On reaching the summit after an arduous trek up steep slopes the views are nothing short of spectacular.

Lens stretches out before us, and Delphine expertly picks out the places on the far ridge where we had visited the day before. It makes for a fitting place to conclude my exploration of the town, its historic mining past and the reminders of the war which raged across this landscape.

Although perhaps overlooked by many visitors to northern France, Lens and the surrounding area have a lot to offer those who come. The town itself is unlikely to win many beauty pageants, and the lingering evidence of hard times following the closure of the mines is impossible to ignore, but the welcome from its people was universally warm and generous. The past looms large here, but one can hope the future is looking brighter too.

Rhys Griffiths travelled as a guest of DFDS and Pas-de-Calais Tourisme. DFDS offers up to 30 crossings per day on its Dover to Calais service and up to 24 daily sailings from Dover to Dunkirk. Cyclists can take their bike across the Channel with DFDS from just £25 each way.