Half a day in Lille

Half a day in Lille, which is closer to Brussels than to Paris, and almost nothing we loved there was fully French.

The Grand Place looks Flemish because it is. The city was Flanders, then Burgundy, then Spanish, and only French after Louis XIV took it, which is why the old exchange on it was built to rival the one in Antwerp, and still looks like it.

There is a second-hand book market in the courtyard behind it, Tuesday to Sunday afternoons. We went in for five minutes and came out forty minutes later having bought nothing, which was a miracle.

The coffee house everyone sends you to on that square is Méo. Two brothers from Warneton, in Belgium, arrived in Lille in the 1920s, sold butter and poultry on the markets, and opened a grocery in 1928. So the most Lillois name on the Grand Place is, quietly, ours.

Then we went to the most Flemish city in France to eat Flemish food and ordered Turkish eggs in an Australian café. Paddo, rue Pierre Mauroy, 16.50, no reservations and the kitchen shuts at four. We would do it again in exactly the same ‘wrong’ order.

Send this to whoever still calls Lille the train stop before Paris