Hauts-de-France

Lille's centre is the Grand'Place, officially the Place du Général-de-Gaulle, ringed by Flemish-style façades and faced by the Vieille Bourse, a 17th-century merchants' exchange whose arcaded courtyard fills with second-hand booksellers and chess players. North of it, Vieux Lille is a quarter of cobbled streets and houses of brick and carved stone, and of estaminets, the Flemish taverns that serve carbonade (beef stewed in beer), potjevleesch (cold meats set in jelly), dishes of Maroilles cheese and the beers of the north. On the first weekend of September, the Braderie, one of the largest flea markets in Europe, fills the whole city.

The Palais des Beaux-Arts is one of the largest art museums in France outside Paris, its collection running from the Flemish masters to the 19th century. In Roubaix, a metro or tram ride away, La Piscine is a fine-arts museum in an Art Deco swimming pool, with sculpture ranged along its water. South of Lille, the Louvre-Lens shows works from the Paris museum in a long hall of glass and aluminium on the site of a former coal pit, in the mining basin whose pit-heads, miners' housing and slag heaps are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Côte d'Opale runs from the Belgian border along the North Sea and the Channel. Calais is its crossing point, where the ferries from Dover dock and the Channel Tunnel's terminal stands at Coquelles outside the town. West of Calais, the coast road climbs to the white chalk cliffs of Cap Blanc-Nez and on to Cap Gris-Nez, a headland of sandstone and clay and the nearest point of France to England, whose coast shows across the strait on clear days. Beyond the capes lie the fishing port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, with its walled upper town and the Nausicaá sea centre, and, past the mouth of the Canche, Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, a resort of villas among pine woods behind a long beach.

At the southern end of the coast, the Baie de Somme is a wide estuary of sandbanks and salt meadows that the tide covers and uncovers twice a day. Harbour seals and grey seals haul out on the sandbanks, most often watched from the Pointe du Hourdel at the bay's southern tip, and on the northern shore the Parc du Marquenterre is a bird reserve on the migration route. Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, with its walled upper town above a quay, and Le Crotoy, facing it across the water, are linked by a heritage railway whose steam trains run round the estuary.

Amiens, on the Somme, is the old capital of Picardy. Its cathedral of Notre-Dame, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the largest Gothic cathedral in France by interior volume; on summer evenings and in the Christmas season, a light show projects onto the west front the colours in which its sculpture was once painted. Below the cathedral, the canal-side quarter of Saint-Leu is the old town's place to eat and drink, and to the east the hortillonnages, market gardens on islands among the canals, are visited by flat-bottomed boat. The house where Jules Verne lived is a museum of his life and work.

Arras has two great squares side by side, the Grand'Place and the Place des Héros, ringed by gabled Flemish Baroque houses on stone arcades, rebuilt as they were after the First World War. Over the Place des Héros rises the belfry of the town hall, one of the belfries of the north on the UNESCO World Heritage List. On the edge of town, the Carrière Wellington, a medieval chalk quarry that soldiers extended into tunnels during the First World War, is now a museum.

Laon stands on a long, isolated hill above the plain, its upper town ringed by ramparts and crowned by the cathedral of Notre-Dame, one of the earliest of the great Gothic cathedrals, with stone oxen looking out from its towers. Beauvais Cathedral, in the Oise, was never finished beyond its choir and transept, and its choir, at about 48 metres, has the highest vault of any Gothic cathedral.

The farmland of the Somme, and of Artois around Arras, holds the memorials and war cemeteries of the First World War. Near Albert, the great arch of the Thiepval Memorial stands over the fields, and the Newfoundland Memorial Park at Beaumont-Hamel keeps its trench lines under the grass; east of Amiens, the Australian National Memorial stands above Villers-Bretonneux, and at Péronne the Historial de la Grande Guerre is a museum of the war in the town's medieval castle. North of Arras, the Canadian memorial on Vimy Ridge and the French national cemetery of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette stand a short drive apart.

The Château de Chantilly rises from its moat on the edge of its forest, and its Musée Condé hangs one of the largest collections of old-master paintings in France, kept as its founder, the Duc d'Aumale, arranged it; outside, André Le Nôtre's gardens run along canals and pools. The Great Stables beside the racecourse house a museum of the horse with riding displays. Trains from the Gare du Nord reach Chantilly-Gouvieux station, about two kilometres from the château, in about 25 minutes.

North-east of Chantilly, the Château de Compiègne, a royal palace that became a favourite residence of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie, keeps its imperial apartments on the edge of the Forest of Compiègne, where the Armistice Glade marks the place the armistice of 1918 was signed. Senlis is a small town of cobbled streets inside Gallo-Roman and medieval walls, around a Gothic cathedral. Near Senlis, beside the A1 motorway, Parc Astérix is one of France's most visited theme parks, built around the Gaulish comic.