Arras: The Belfry, the Wellington Quarry and the Squares

Required Activities

• Take the lift and the last forty-odd steps up the belfry to the gallery under the clock and look out over the whole town — at 75 m it is still the tallest thing in Arras. On the way up remember what you are inside: German artillery brought this tower down with sixty-nine shells on 21 October 1914, and it was rebuilt to the same design but with a reinforced concrete frame behind the stone. The two-metre gold lion on top, holding a sun because Louis XIV put it there, is a copy — the battered original is in the fine arts museum

• On the guided way through the quarry, find the names the diggers gave their own galleries — Wellington, Auckland and Nelson under the Ronville quarter, Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool under Saint-Sauveur — and the red painted inscriptions left when the tunnels were reopened as air-raid shelters in the next war. Finish at the spot where 24,000 men came up out of the ground at half past five on the morning of 9 April 1917

• Walk the arcades of both squares end to end — the Place des Héros in front of the town hall, now kept for pedestrians, and through the passage into the much larger Grand-Place beside it — and count how far you can get under cover without stepping into the open, which is what the arcades were built for

• Go into the town hall at the foot of the belfry and find Charles Hoffbauer's long painted frieze, finished in 1932, of the people of 16th-century Arras at their business in a manner borrowed from Brueghel — then work out from the belfry beside it that this was a military building first: its bell opened and shut the town gates, and the tower held the prison