Hauts-de-France

The plains between the Channel and the Ardennes have no natural defences, and their history is a list of invasions. Clovis won control of northern Gaul at Soissons in 486, and Hugh Capet was elected king at Senlis and crowned at Noyon in 987. In the 12th and 13th centuries Picardy's wheat lands paid for the first generation of Gothic cathedrals — Noyon, Laon, Soissons, Amiens, Beauvais — while the cloth towns of Flanders and Artois, Lille, Douai and Arras, grew rich on English wool and built belfries to proclaim their civic freedoms.

The English won at Crécy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415, both fought here, and held Calais from 1347 to 1558. Flanders and Artois passed to the dukes of Burgundy and then to the Spanish Habsburgs; Louis XIV conquered them between 1659 and 1678, taking Lille in 1667, and Vauban ringed the new frontier with citadels. Coal, found near Valenciennes in the 18th century and under Lens in the 1840s, and the textile mills of Roubaix and Tourcoing turned the north into France's industrial engine, the world of Zola's Germinal; the Courrières pit explosion of 1906 killed 1,099 miners.

From 1914 to 1918 the Western Front ran through Artois, the Somme and the Aisne. The battle of the Somme in 1916 cost more than a million casualties, and the armistice was signed in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne on 11 November 1918 — the carriage in which Hitler received France's surrender in June 1940, days after 338,000 Allied troops had been lifted from Dunkirk. The last coal mine closed in 1990; the Channel Tunnel and high-speed rail, opened in 1993–94, made Lille a crossroads between Paris, London and Brussels.

Two popular cultures overlap here. North of the Artois hills people call themselves Ch'tis, after the sound of their Picard dialect, and the 2008 comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, the most-watched French film in the history of French cinemas, made a national joke of the south's dread of the grey north and of the warmth found on arrival. Around Dunkirk, Cassel and Hazebrouck the heritage is Flemish: place names in -ghem and -brouck, a fading West Flemish dialect, and estaminets, taverns with wooden table games. Picardy, to the south, is quieter and more rural, with its own Picard speech.

Festivals are communal and loud. Towns parade wickerwork giants — Gayant and his family in Douai each July, Reuze Papa and Reuze Maman in Cassel — a custom listed by UNESCO, as are the region's 23 belfries. Dunkirk's carnival fills the weeks before Lent with costumed bands, brass, umbrellas and a shower of smoked herrings thrown from the town hall, and the Braderie de Lille, on the first weekend of September, is Europe's largest flea market, when restaurants compete to build the highest heap of mussel shells.

Mining left brick terraces called corons, brass bands, pigeon racing, the feast of Saint Barbara on 4 December and a passion for football: Racing Club de Lens fills a 38,000-seat stadium in a town of 32,000. The Paris–Roubaix cycle race crosses the cobbled farm tracks each April. Remembrance is part of ordinary life too, from the upkeep of hundreds of Commonwealth cemeteries to the dawn service on Anzac Day at Villers-Bretonneux.

Hauts-de-France has almost six million people and one of the youngest populations in France. Lille has about 236,000 residents, but its metropolitan area, running through Roubaix and Tourcoing to the Belgian border, holds 1.2 million, and the old mining basin from Béthune through Lens to Valenciennes forms a second, looser conurbation of over a million. Amiens (about 134,000) is the chief city of the Picard half; Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Beauvais, Saint-Quentin, Arras and Compiègne have 40,000 to 90,000 each, and the south of the Oise is commuter country for Paris and Roissy airport.

The collapse of coal, steel and textiles left the region with some of the highest unemployment and poverty rates and the lowest life expectancy in mainland France. Reinvention is real all the same: the north is France's leading car-making region, with Toyota near Valenciennes and Renault at Douai and Maubeuge, and battery plants are opening at Douvrin, Douai and Dunkirk; the Mulliez family's retail groups — Auchan, first opened in Roubaix, Decathlon and Leroy Merlin — are national names. Boulogne is France's first fishing port, Calais its first passenger port, and the big farms of Picardy and Artois grow most of the country's potatoes and endives and half its sugar beet.

Everyday life is sociable and unpretentious: chips from a roadside baraque à frites, Sunday morning at Lille's Wazemmes market, weekends on the wide beaches of the Opal Coast, shopping across the Belgian border. Calais and its neighbours have lived for two decades with migrants trying to reach Britain, now mostly in small boats.

This is beer country, and the kitchen shows its Flemish side. Carbonade flamande is beef braised in beer, often with gingerbread and brown sugar; potjevleesch, a Dunkirk dish, sets chicken, rabbit, pork and veal in a vinegary jelly and is eaten cold with chips; and the welsh, cheddar melted with beer over ham and bread, is a brasserie staple from Lille to the coast. Mussels and chips are the dish of the Braderie, and chips, fried twice and bought from a baraque à frites, are close to a regional emblem.

Picardy contributes the ficelle picarde, a pancake rolled around ham and mushrooms and baked in cream, the leek pie called flamiche, duck pâté in pastry from Amiens, and salt-meadow lamb, cockles and samphire from the Bay of Somme; Boulogne smokes herring. The cheeses are strong: Maroilles, a square, orange-rinded cheese made in the Avesnois since the Middle Ages and baked into tarts; its longer-cured cousin Vieux-Lille; the cone-shaped Boulette d'Avesnes; and Mimolette, the orange ball first made on Colbert's orders to replace Dutch imports. Endives, called chicons, are baked with ham and béchamel.

Sweets include the thin vanilla-filled waffles sold by Méert in Lille, tarte au sucre, the mint-flavoured bêtises de Cambrai, the almond macarons of Amiens and Picardy's tall brioche, gâteau battu; whipped crème Chantilly takes its name from the château. The local beers are bières de garde — amber, malty and cellar-aged, such as Jenlain, Ch'ti and 3 Monts — and genièvre, the juniper spirit of Houlle and Wambrechies, goes into the miner's laced coffee, the bistouille. The far south of the Aisne, around Château-Thierry, lies within the Champagne appellation.

Lille's centre is Flemish in brick and carved stone: the Grand'Place and the arcaded Vieille Bourse of 1653, the lanes of Vieux-Lille, Vauban's star-shaped citadel and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, with La Piscine, an art museum around an Art Deco swimming pool, in neighbouring Roubaix. Arras has two arcaded squares of Flemish-Baroque gables, rebuilt after 1918, and at Lens the Louvre-Lens museum stands beside the twin slag heaps of Loos-en-Gohelle, part of the UNESCO-listed mining basin. Dunkirk has the beaches and museum of the 1940 evacuation.

The Somme battlefields spread around Albert and Péronne: Lutyens's Thiepval Memorial to 72,000 missing, the Lochnagar mine crater, the preserved trenches of the Newfoundland park at Beaumont-Hamel and the Australian memorial at Villers-Bretonneux. Further north are the Canadian memorial on Vimy Ridge and the Ring of Remembrance at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Amiens cathedral, begun in 1220, is the largest in France, its nave 42 metres high and its west front lit in its medieval colours on some evenings; below it lie the canals of Saint-Leu and the floating market gardens of the hortillonnages.

The Opal Coast runs from Calais, with Rodin's Burghers outside the town hall, past the chalk headland of Cap Blanc-Nez and Cap Gris-Nez, the closest point to England, to Boulogne's walled upper town and Nausicaá aquarium and the villas of Le Touquet. South of it the Bay of Somme has a seal colony, the Marquenterre bird reserve and the old port of Saint-Valery.

In the south, Chantilly pairs a moated château holding the Musée Condé — France's largest collection of old master paintings after the Louvre — with Le Nôtre's park, the 18th-century Great Stables and the racecourse. Nearby are Senlis, the imperial palace and Armistice clearing at Compiègne, the castle of Pierrefonds, Beauvais cathedral with the highest Gothic choir ever built, and the hilltop cathedral city of Laon.