Roubaix and Villeneuve-d'Ascq: La Piscine and the LaM

Required Activities

• Stand at the shallow end of the 50-metre basin and look up at the two stained-glass windows at either end — one is the rising sun, the other the setting sun — then work along the galleries and find the rows of private bathtubs stacked on two floors, because this was a public wash-house as much as a swimming pool; the mayor's brief to Albert Baert in 1922 was to build the finest pool in France. Finish in the rose garden the whole complex is laid out around, like a cloister

• In the modern rooms at the LaM, work out that nearly everything in front of you was bought by two men: find the nine Picassos and six Braques that Roger Dutilleul bought from Kahnweiler when both painters were unknown, then the six Modiglianis, and count how many Lanskoys his nephew Jean Masurel went on to acquire — there are about forty

• Go into Manuelle Gautrand's extension, where the art brut hangs, and pick one work made by someone with no art training at all that you would hang at home — this is the largest public collection of art brut in France, built by the association L'Aracine in a cellar at Neuilly-sur-Marne from 1982 and given to the museum in 1999

• Walk the two hectares of sculpture park around the LaM and find four pieces by name: Calder's stabile Croix du Sud and his Guillotine pour huit, Lipchitz's bronze Le Chant des Voyelles, and Picasso's Femme aux bras écartés — go close enough to that last one to see the pebbles set into the concrete

• Find three things in La Piscine's own rooms: Camille Claudel's bust La Petite Châtelaine, her plaster group Les Causeuses, and Tamara de Lempicka's La Communiante — then go into the textile rooms and look closely at the sample books of French cloth from 1835 to 1940, which is what the town was built on