Amiens

Why go

Amiens has the cathedral that Gothic was building towards: so vast that Notre-Dame de Paris would fit inside it twice, and so unified because the main structure went up in about fifty years. A few streets away, the old canal quarter of Saint-Leu leads to the hortillonnages, hundreds of hectares of market gardens on islands in the Somme, still worked by boat. Add the museum in Jules Verne’s house and you have a small city that rewards curiosity far more than its reputation suggests.

History

The first town here was Samarobriva, ‘the bridge over the Somme', chief settlement of the Ambiani, a Gaulish people; under Rome it controlled one of the great roads of Gaul. The Normans sacked it in the ninth century, and in 1185 it was joined to the French crown.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Amiens was one of the great cloth towns of northern Europe, made rich by woad, the plant that gave ‘Amiens blue’ dye. In 1206 it acquired a famous relic, the reputed head of John the Baptist, brought from Constantinople, and pilgrims flocked in. When lightning destroyed the Romanesque cathedral in 1218, the town could afford something extraordinary: in 1220 Bishop Évrard de Fouilloy laid the first stone of a new cathedral designed by Robert de Luzarches, and the main structure, vaults included, was finished by 1269.

In 1597 Spanish troops seized the town by surprise and held it through a six-month siege before Henri IV took it back and built a citadel. On 25 March 1802 Britain and France signed the Peace of Amiens in the town hall. From 1871 Jules Verne lived in Amiens, sat on the city council and championed the municipal circus that now bears his name, until his death in 1905.

Amiens suffered in both World Wars; the Battle of Amiens in August 1918 opened the Allied offensive that ended the war, and German bombing in May 1940 destroyed most of the centre. The city was rebuilt in brick, concrete and white stone, with Auguste Perret’s tower by the station as its landmark. The cathedral was spared, and was inscribed by UNESCO in 1981.

UNESCO World Heritage: Amiens Cathedral (1981); also part of the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France (1998)