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 | Arras Downtown car rental - Travel Guide |  |
ARRAS, with its fine old centre, is one of the prettiest towns in northern France. It was renowned for its tapestries in the Middle Ages, giving its name to the hangings behind which Shakespeare's Hamlet killed Polonius. Subsequently the town fell under Spanish control, and many of its citizen’s today claim that Spanish blood runs in their veins. Only in 1654 was Arras returned to the kingdom of France.
Although almost destroyed in World War I, the town bears few obvious battle scars. Reconstruction here, particularly after the last war, has been careful and stylish, and two grand arcaded squares in the centre - Grand' Place and the smaller place des Héros - preserve their historic, harmonious character. On every side are restored seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions, built in relatively restrained Flemish style, and, on place des Héros, there's a grandly ornate Hôtel de Ville , its entrance hall housing a permanent photographic display documenting the wartime destruction of the town and sheltering a pair of géants (festival giants) awaiting the city's next fête.
Also inside the town hall is the entrance to the belfry viewing platform (approximately three visits per day, depending on demand, starting from the tourist office; 15F/?2.29) and les souterrains (or les boves ) - cold, dark passageways and spacious vaults tunnelled beneath the centre of the city (May-Sept Mon-Sat 9am-6.30pm, Sun 10am-1pm & 2.30-6.30pm; Oct-April Mon-Sat 9am-noon & 2-6pm, Sun 10am-12.30pm & 3-6.30pm; 22F/?3.35). Once down, you're escorted around an impressive area and given an interesting survey of local history. During World War I, the rooms - many of which have fine, tiled floors and lovely pillars and stairways - were used as a British barracks and hospital.
Arras's other main sight is its enormous cathedral and the Benedictine Abbaye St-Vaast , next door, a grey-stone classical building, still pockmarked by shrapnel, that was erected in the eighteenth century by Cardinal Rohen. The Abbaye now houses the Musée des Beaux-Arts , whose entrance is at 22 rue Paul-Donnier (April-Sept Mon & Wed-Sat 10am-noon & 2-6pm, Sun 10am-noon & 3-6pm; rest of year Mon & Wed-Fri 10am-noon & 2-5pm, Sat 10am-noon & 2-6pm, Sun 10am-noon & 3-6pm; 20F/?3.05), which contains a mediocre collection of paintings, including a couple of Jordaens and Brueghels, fragments of sculpture, local ceramics and some of the tapestries or arras (the final "s" is pronounced) that made the town famous in medieval times.
On the western edge of town, next to the Vauban barracks, is a war cemetery and memorial by the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, a movingly elegiac, classical colonnade of ivy-covered brick and stone, commemorating 35,928 missing soldiers, the endless columns of their names inscribed on the walls. It is a mournful corner of town: around the back of the old brick Vauban fortress, in an overgrown moat, is the Mur des Fusillés, where some two hundred Resistance fighters were shot by firing squad in the last war - most of them of Polish descent, most of them miners, and most of them Communists.
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