Post 58. Le Havre 4. Plus ça change: Le Havre after nearly 40 years.
On our first full day in Le Havre, I woke with an urgent need to find a baguette for breakfast! Given that I no longer eat bread for breakfast, this came as a bit of a shock to the system - but I suppose sensory memories stay in your head for a long time, and when in France, one of the absolute essentials is a fresh baguette every morning.
Baguettes and Bus Apps
Luckily, there was a Carrefour City just around the corner, as the nearest boulangerie was at least 2km away. From what we could see, these small neighbourhood versions of the big hypermarkets have popped up all over the city - a massive change from 39 years ago, when it seemed as if there was just one Monoprix serving the entire city centre.
After breakfast (the baguette was delicious!), it was time to head into the city. We planned to leave the car parked for most of our stay and use public transport. I downloaded the official LiA transport app, but frustratingly it wouldn't work with an Irish phone. Then I found an alternative in the Fairtiq app, a general transport app used in several French cities.
The app was easy to use. There was no need to put money into an account in advance - it was simply pay-as-you-go. Our local bus, the C4, went all the way to the bus and train stations, so we sat back and enjoyed the ride as it wound its way through the very familiar city centre. Along the way, I pointed out a few landmarks to Tricia. I was surprised by how little of the city centre seemed to have changed!
La Gare et Les Docks Vauban
We walked through the train station to see a major transformation I had read about. I remembered its tall windows filled with clear glass blocks, but as part of Un Été au Havre, the city's annual public and street art festival, the artist Isabelle Cornaro has replaced the panes with coloured glass inspired by the stained glass of Église Saint-Joseph. They looked absolutely magnificent in the midday sunlight.
We then walked towards Les Docks Vauban, where abandoned dockside warehouses have been transformed into a huge shopping and leisure complex, with bars, restaurants and a cinema as well as hundreds of shops. There was absolutely nothing of note in this part of the city when I lived here, and it was fantastic to see it brought back to life.
The place was buzzing with young people and families, and it really did seem like the new city centre. I imagine it gets even busier in winter - if the weather is still as bad as I remember it! All around, there were other signs of new life, such as redeveloped dockside walks, Les Bains des Docks swimming complex designed by Jean Nouvel, and several small cruise barges.
Along the seafront
After lunch at Les Docks Vauban (more about the food in a later post), we decided to walk right along the coast, past Quai Southampton and the Esplanade Nelson Mandela (new to me), all the way to the new marina, and further still to the beach and Sainte-Adresse.
At first glance, this part of the city looked much the same, but a closer look revealed lots of permanent street art installations, which I will come back to in another post.
The old ferry terminal, built in a very modern glass-and-concrete style, is still there, but it is permanently closed. No ferries leave Le Havre for the UK or Ireland any more.
The building is now being refurbished to create a second modern art museum, within walking distance of MuMa, the city's main art gallery, which was already there in my day. There will be more on MuMa in a later post.
I couldn't resist taking a nostalgic picture of this forgotten, rusting sign for the Ireland ferry berthing post.
I was so pleased to see that the multicoloured beach cabins were still there on La Plage. As the day was warm and sunny, many were in full use for picnics, get-togethers and barbecues. As I stood there gazing over the roofs, a memory came floating back: one of the other assistants had been able to borrow the key to one of the cabins from a teacher at their school, and we spent a few happy hours there, dining on ham and cheese baguettes washed down with large brown bottles of screw-top beer from the local petrol station!
With no beach cabin this time, we had to make ourselves as comfortable as we could on the pebble beach in the late-afternoon sun.
By the time we reached Sainte-Adresse, in the early evening, we were exhausted, so we found a bar overlooking the beach for the French tradition of the apéro - we didn't need our phones to tell us we had walked the best part of 11km since this morning!
A Walk with a Greeter
On the Monday, a local volunteer called Florence showed us more of the changes since 1987 - along with a few parts of the city I had never really seen before. Florence volunteers with Greeters, an international not-for-profit network. The local branch, Greeters Le Havre, offers personalised walking tours on request, and unlike other walking tours I have been on, there is no charge at all.
Florence, a fluent English speaker, is retired from Irish Continental Line - the company behind the ferry on that rusting sign - and she was happy to give the tour in English, as Tricia doesn't speak French.
We met her at 11am at Le Volcan, completed in 1982 to a design by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer and now home to one of France's national theatres. This was a spot I knew very well, as in 1987-88 it housed an independent cinema showing mostly classic and foreign films. It is no exaggeration to say that I was often there three times a week during the winter months! As I mentioned in my first post, we knew it as "the yoghurt pots".
The caption beside the outstretched hand reads " Un jour, comme cette eau, la terre, les plages et les montagnes a tous appartiendront" - meaning "One day, everything, just like this water, the earth, the beaches and the mountains will belong to everyone". The line makes little sense now in relation to the outstretched hand, but in 1987 there was a constant stream of water dripping from the palm. This quote is from Oscar Niemeyer and expresses his political, pacifist, and humanist commitment, with the idea of a universal sharing of the Earth's natural resources.
When we told her about our long walk along the seafront, Florence decided to change tack and take us to Quartier Saint-François, one of the few areas where some of the old city buildings survived the war, and which was rebuilt in a more traditional style.
This is Le Havre Cathedral, which partly survived the bombing. Notice the life-size cylindrical spinning tops of polished steel in front of it - an art installation that encourages people to see the cathedral and the surrounding buildings from a new angle.
Florence told us that this crêperie, La Bigouden, is said to be the oldest building in Le Havre - and it serves fine crêpes, as we discovered when we returned that same evening.
Close by is the beautiful Hôtel Dubocage de Bléville, a museum that is currently closed for refurbishment.
Then there is Église Saint-François, which gives the quarter its name.
I absolutely loved this street corner, where rue de la Crique meets rue de Bretagne, even though the buildings could do with some refurbishment. Before the war, this area had a large Breton population, with countless crêperies. When Le Havre was being rebuilt, the Bretons successfully fought against Perret's designs for the Breton quarter and won permission to rebuild their houses with steep Breton-style roofs instead.
One of the most surprising and even shocking nuggets of information that Florence pointed out on the walking tour concerned these two huge containers of aircraft fuel in Le Havre port, just across from MuMa. They are directly connected by underground pipes to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, ensuring a direct uninterrupted supply link from the tanks to the airport, which means that delivery tankers are not required to service the airport. To be honest, I don't know if this should be considered a good news story or a bad news one, but it came as a surprise nonetheless.
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The tour ended at the magnificent Église Saint-Joseph, Auguste Perret's masterpiece: heavy concrete columns interspersed with thousands of pieces of coloured glass, which are truly mesmerising as you crane your neck upwards above the altar.
Florence did a great job. She took us to several parts of the city I had never visited, and cast others I thought I knew in a new light - my memory was a little hazy, to say the least! We offered to buy her lunch afterwards, but she had another engagement.
The other big change of course was the tramway. There were two lines, and both of these covered the stretch between the train station and the beach. As these would be the only wagons I would get to travel on during this trip, it was an absolute imperative for me in writing a blog with this title, to hop on board. The Fairtiq app worked seamlessly.
Nearly 40 years on, Le Havre has changed in ways I never expected: the docks are buzzing, the station glows with coloured glass, and the ferries to Ireland are gone. Yet so much of the city centre is just as I left it - and it still felt like coming home.
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