The Beaux-Arts and Vauban's Citadelle

Maison Coilliot

The Art Nouveau house Hector Guimard built in Lille, a small façade of enamelled lava at 14 rue de Fleurus, raised between 1898 and 1900.

You're standing in front of a house that was built to be a billboard. Maison Coilliot, at 14 rue de Fleurus, is the Art Nouveau house Hector Guimard built in Lille, and it went up between 1898 and 1900 for Louis Coilliot, a ceramics merchant who sold a new material called enamelled lava. Guimard met him in 1897 at an exhibition of ceramics and the fire arts, and Coilliot asked for a façade that would advertise the product. Look at the street wall: the lava panels sit among cut stone and brick, and the lines curve and swell. The house has been a listed monument since 1977, but it is not open to the public, so everything worth seeing is right here on the street. When you're ready, walk north along rue de Fleurus toward the big classical building two streets up: that is the Palais des Beaux-Arts.

Boulevard de la Liberté

A 1.6-kilometre Second Empire boulevard laid out in 1863 over the demolished fortifications, lined with listed mansions.

This broad avenue was cut through in 1863, after the old city walls came down, as part of the Second Empire remodelling of Lille. It opened as Boulevard de l'Impératrice and only became Boulevard de la Liberté in 1870, a few days after the Third Republic was proclaimed. Look at the buildings, not the traffic. Walking north-west you pass number 105, the Hôtel Delbecque by Émile Vandenbergh, and then number 21, the Hôtel Catel-Béghin, built in 1877 by Henri Contamine for André Catel-Béghin, an industrialist and merchant who was mayor of Lille from 1873 to 1878; its carved stone blends French Renaissance and classical motifs.

Both are listed, and both are private, so the façades are the visit. A third listed building on this boulevard, the Bains Lillois by Albert Baert at number 219, sits back behind you to the south-east and is not on this route. Horse-drawn trams ran along here in the early 1900s. Continue north-west; the boulevard ends where the green begins.