Things to do in Lille

Neighborhood · North of the Grand'Place

Flemish brick and stone gables, narrow cobbled streets and the most expensive small shops in the north of France.

Local tip: Rue de la Monnaie and rue Basse are what everyone photographs. The quieter streets around the Hospice Comtesse and rue Princesse — de Gaulle's birthplace is on it — have the better bars and half the crowd.

Landmark · City centre

The main square and, beside it, a seventeenth-century merchants' exchange built as a courtyard ringed by twenty-four identical houses.

Local tip: The Vieille Bourse courtyard holds a second-hand book market most afternoons, and chess players in the corner. It is free, it is covered, and it is the single best place to shelter from a drache.

Food · Wazemmes

The city's great market — covered hall plus a vast open-air spread that takes over the surrounding streets.

Local tip: Sunday morning is the full version and it is genuinely crowded. Go early, buy a rotisserie chicken and eat it in the square, then have a beer in one of the cafés on place de la Nouvelle Aventure. This is the most Lille thing you can do in a morning.

Nature · West of the centre

Vauban's star-shaped fortress of 1667, still an army site, ringed by the city's largest park and a wooded walking circuit.

Local tip: The fortress interior is only open on guided tours, but the ramparts loop outside is open all the time and is where the whole city runs. The zoo next door is free and is a genuinely good small zoo.

Culture · République

One of the largest fine art museums in France outside the Louvre, with an extraordinary basement of eighteenth-century relief maps of fortified towns.

Local tip: Go straight down to the plans-reliefs in the basement first. They are enormous scale models of northern fortress towns built for Louis XIV as military intelligence, lit in the dark, and almost nobody makes it down there before running out of energy upstairs.

Landmark · Croix, north-east of Lille

A vast 1932 modernist house by Robert Mallet-Stevens, built for a textile magnate, derelict for decades and restored to the last light fitting.

Local tip: It is a twenty-minute tram ride out on the Mongy and it is run by the national monuments body, so it is properly open rather than by appointment. Almost no visitor to Lille has heard of it, and it is the best building in the metropolitan area.