Post 55. Le Havre 1. Retour au Havre: Back After 39 Years
Eglise Saint-Joseph and Le Volcan
Eglise Saint-Joseph and Le VolcanThis series of posts is a new departure from what I have written on this blog over the past three years.
This year, instead of heading back to Eastern Europe in September, my wife Tricia and I will be taking the ferry from Dublin to Cherbourg and staying for a week in Le Havre.
The themes of my previous trips continue: the long shadow of the two World Wars - communism, the Holocaust, and the way cities were rebuilt. This trip will focus in particular on post-war architecture.
It is also a deeply personal trip down memory lane. In 1987, as a 23-year-old, I spent an academic year in Le Havre as an English Language Assistant in two secondary schools - Collège Gérard Philipe and Collège Irène Joliot-Curie.
Returning to a place after nearly four decades is always a mix of nostalgia and curiosity. I absolutely loved my time in the city, but I never fully appreciated its architecture. I must have walked past dozens of these grid-perfect façades on my way to school each day without ever once looking up - I was just too busy living my best French life!
On this trip, I hope to see the city with new eyes, while revisiting some of the student haunts we frequented at the time - if they still exist at all, that is!
Learning to Love Concrete
To me, Le Havre is not just any city. It is where I found my love for all things French, and it is also a living monument to human resilience and architectural genius. It has much in common with other cities I have visited over the past three years, especially Birmingham and Warsaw, each of which was devastated by war and had to decide how to rebuild. Warsaw painstakingly recreated its old town, brick by brick. Birmingham, like Le Havre, chose to look forward rather than back.
Le Havre was not an easy city to fall in love with when I first arrived - its architecture was so unlike anything else I had seen in France. Slowly but surely, I grew to love it, even if the ever-present wind and rain of a Normandy winter didn't make it easy! I walked everywhere and was always on the lookout for new routes to wherever I was going. After a few months, I knew the city centre, with its American-style grid of streets, like the back of my hand.
From Ruins to UNESCO World Heritage
For those who have yet to visit the city, a little background will help set the scene for this series.
In September 1944, a massive Allied bombing campaign left Le Havre in ruins. About 85% of the city centre was destroyed - roughly 150 hectares of the historic core. Thousands of people were killed, and the port, one of the most important in France, was paralysed.
After the war, rather than rebuilding the old city as it had been, France chose a bold, modern path. Between 1945 and 1964, the city centre was rebuilt by the architect Auguste Perret and his team, with Perret leading the work until his death in 1954.
Perret was a lover of reinforced concrete - cheap, quick to build with, and able to make use of the rubble left by the bombing. He believed concrete could be beautiful, and he used an innovative grid design and prefabricated elements to create a unified, modernist cityscape.
This remarkable achievement was recognised in 2005, when the city centre was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site - a rare honour for a city rebuilt so recently.
Over the years, the port has grown into France's leading container terminal, and its once-neglected docks have been revitalised. Other striking landmarks have joined the skyline too, such as Oscar Niemeyer's curving cultural centre, Le Volcan, completed in 1982 - which I knew as "the yoghurt pots". But the real magic lies in how Perret built the city, which I will return to in a later post.
Looking Ahead to September
Seeing Le Havre again through the lens of its history, I am beginning to appreciate the poetry hidden inside Perret's rigid lines. From the soaring, light-filled tower of Église Saint-Joseph to the grand layout of the Hôtel de Ville, I can't wait to rediscover the city.
Just a few weeks before we set off, I came across an article in The Guardian on the newly published diaries of Samuel Beckett, which reproduced the entry above from 30 September 1936. Beckett wrote it after spending a September day in Le Havre, 90 years ago. His handwriting is hard to decipher, but he sums up the city in one word - "charming". We will never experience those pre-war charms, but I am confident that many hidden concrete charms will reveal themselves to me again during our week-long stay.
In the coming posts, I will be describing our journey and home exchange, revisiting the six addresses that shaped my story, looking at how the city has changed in nearly 40 years, exploring Perret's architecture and Le Havre's street art, enjoying the local food and wine, and venturing out to Honfleur, Étretat and Fécamp. So, stay tuned!
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