Wed Oct 1. Lens.

 Medieval Lens was a small but prosperous walled city dependent on agriculture and trade links.

In 1849 coal was discovered, and life changed drastically.  The Lens mining Company was formed and soon became very profitable. The Company built housing for miners, provided company-owned stores and bars, company-run schools and medical services (but also, poor pay for an inherently dangerous and unhealthy job). Before WWI,  1,000 miners and their families lived in Lens, and similar communities and mines sprang up all over the area, fairly close together.

During the Great War, Lens was completely destroyed. The town was rebuilt by the private mining companies in the 1920s, and was partially destroyed again in WWII.  In 1946 the mining operations were nationalised and continued until the 1980s.

With the end of mining, unemployment became a serious problem. Some authorities wanted to get rid of all traces of coal mining - others said it was an important heritage. Eventually UNESCO declared the legacy of coal mining to be a world heritage. 

Typical housing. Each family had a large garden at the rear of the house that the Company obliged them to use as a kitchen garden (part of the rental agreements).

One of the mines. The concrete tower was the most recent construction - in the last decades the mining process was heavily automated with machines replacing hundreds of workers (the underground horses had disappeared earlier).

And of course I had to climb the highest slag heap in Europe. I got vertigo at the top and had to sit down - which of course meant I then had to wash all my clothes and myself ASAP!  Anyway, I now feel I have seen the pyramids.

In 2002 Lens was chosen as the site for a branch of the Louvre museum. Designed by Japanese architects, it sits unpretentiously on an old horizontal slag heap in the centre of town. The railway lines in and out of the mining site have become beautiful walkways with rather interesting benches.

Inside there is extensive fairly conventional gallery space for special exhibits, but the collection from the Louvre is housed in one huge open space, arranged chronologically, with items from all over the world.  It took me aback - I’m so used to exhibits arranged by culture, or at least by theme - I found it hard to concentrate on each piece.

Here is a beautiful Renaissance face.  A sculpture by Francesco Laurana, Croatia and France, c. 1485.

And another happier looking lady - an Etruscan clay figure c. 525 BC from Cervetri - a happy memory of a visit to this early burial site from my first pilgrimage walk to Rome.