The final day of our British Isles cruise aboard Regal Princess was Le Havre which you will know immediately is not British in the slightest because you are a smart person but don’t blame me for the name Princess Cruises gave their itinerary.
We’d not been to Le Havre before and didn’t have very many expectations about what we’d find ashore or what there really was to do, but we guessed it might be similar to Cherbourg and so figured we’d have a casual wander, see if anything was actually open (it never is in Cherbourg, that’s for sure), and see what the day brought. We would end up being very pleasantly surprised and since I’m not one of those people who says things like “read on to see what we really thought!” in some vain attempt to persuade you to stay for some reason, I’ll tell you now: Le Havre is about a thousand times better than Cherbourg.
We knew of two things that might interest us based on a quick nose at some sites and the map, and we could see they were in roughly the same direction, so on a cool, cloudy day we had breakfast, gathered our things, then set off to explore Le Havre.
Regal Princess wasn’t the only cruise ship in the port of Le Havre on the day that we visited and we passed Norwegian Getaway as we walked into the city.
I was instantly taken with the general architecture we could see in Le Havre. The area we walked around during the day was largely the area bombed by allied forces during World War II (because the Germans were there, not because we thought we could get away with in the fog of war). Auguste Perret was the architect mostly responsible for the prevalence of modernist looks and the use of concrete, and I adore those styles.
The first of Le Havre’s “attractions” we wanted to see was the Catène de Containers sculpture. It’s a reasonably new sight on the city’s waterfront area but it’s a bold and colourful one. Designed by Vincent Ganivet and erected in 2017, the sculpture forms a vibrant archway to the city and references the city’s importance as a container port.
St Joseph’s Church was the only other thing we had plans to look at in Le Havre. One of only two buildings actually designed by Auguste Perret during the overall redesign of the downtown city area, this brutalist beauty was built in the early 1950s. The design represents a lantern and it’s a dominating form from the outside. But outside is barely half the story.
Inside St Joseph’s Church it’s hard to describe just how beautiful it is. The darkness and raw concrete should feel imposing but brutalism is an emotional, forward-looking design that always feels positive to me. The height of the tower and the colourful stained glass window panes catching the light and beaming a kaleidoscope into the space, coupled with geometric shapes and lines that draw the eye ever upwards is genuinely mesmerising and joyous. My wife – who doesn’t like churches and finds them oppressive usually – sat down to just soak it all in. An absolute treasure of a building.
From one master architect to another now. We headed roughly east, intending only to find a route through to a large green space we could see on the map, but this brought us to a large square in which there was a very odd building shaped like a mountain with its peak removed. This turned out to be the House of Culture designed by Oscar Niemeyer, famous for designing Brazil’s capital city of Brasília, and which for obvious reasons is known by the locals as The Volcano.
In addition to some nice sea-themed street art around Le Havre we were quite taken with the artwork on the exterior of what turned out to be a hotel too.
That green space we were hunting down was the Place de l’Hôtel de ville, or the Town Hall Park as I decided to call it. It wasn’t quite a public square, it wasn’t quite a park or gardens, but it was all very attractive, nicely laid with with lawn areas, sculptures, and some water features, and all with a view to the town hall building itself, the second of those designed by Auguste Perret.
The next sight to catch our eyes was the public art piece called the Narrow House. See if you can guess why it’s called that. This is a representation of the artist Erwin Wurm’s childhood home and it was erected in 2022. It was a disorienting thing to see from the outside and we’d have loved to look inside but it wasn’t open during our visit.
By this time we’d picked two more places we wanted to visit based on the phone map and headed to the first of those, crossing over the elegantly curved Francois le Chevalier bridge and affording ourselves of some views back towards both the Volcano and stunning St Joseph’s Church in the distance.
There were a few fabulous examples of eclectic architecture to appreciate on the short walk we’d planned and we were also quite amused to pass a statue to the city’s founder upon which someone had wrapped a scarf. Possibly a hangover from the pandemic? Possibly local tradition? This felt in keeping with the statue in Glasgow that locals top with a traffic cone.
We detoured briefly at this point to take a few photos of the war memorial. Every city that saw its people killed in the great wars of the twentieth century will have one of these somewhere. Nobody ever learns from them.
The first of the two remaining stops we wanted to make was the cathedral. We’re not religious – far from it – but history and architecture do creep alongside religious monuments around the world and we’re rather fond of those subjects.
The building only became a cathedral in the 1970s but it, or some version of it, has been standing in this spot since the sixteenth century. The Baroque style is very distinctive in a city where modernism is everywhere and the reason that the church survived the extensive bombing of Le Havre may lie in its relatively compact form.
Inside the cathedral we were surprised and a little freaked out by the netting in place to protect worshippers during some renovation work. There was something decidedly spider-like about it all, as if this religious building had been taken over by Shelob.
Le Havre Cathedral’s organs were a gift from Cardinal Richelieu. He wasn’t quite as evil as the Three Musketeers would have you believe.
Our final stop in Le Havre was to a taproom called L’Havrais Bière. You know us – maybe; if you’ve read any of our other posts; and if you cared to remember – and you know we like locally-brewed beer if we can find it. This place was superb. The beer was absolutely gorgeous and then we spotted cakes and cookies too. I mean, everything a person needs after a few hours walking around enjoying the culture of a new city.
And so to the walk back to the ship, largely retracing the early part of our route outwards in the morning. We passed by the container arches artwork once more.
A distinctive art piece turned out to have a close connection with our cruise ship. This was both an artwork and a weather vane, made in bronze, sculpted by Klara Kristalova, and known as the Sea Witch. If you’re familiar with Princess Cruises, with whom we were cruising, then you’ll know that the cruise line’s logo and the artwork on the prow of Princess ships is also that of the Sea Witch. A lovely coincidence.
My wife likes seafood. I don’t. It’s a texture thing. And if there was ever anything that was going to reinforce my dislike of seafood then it was coming across some bins in which discarded scallop shells were piled high. I cannot describe how vile the smell was. Be very thankful that the internet still doesn’t have a protocol to cover transmitting odours when you visit web pages. I had to take a deep breath, run to the bin, take this shot, and get far enough away from the stench before passing out, and I could still feel the smell on me somehow. Unbelievably awful.
That pretty much concluded our time in Le Havre and we loved what we saw in the French city, knowing that we only saw a small fraction. This is a place we need to visit again if only to hunt down more of the lovely art and architecture.
A short walk later brought us through the port, past the NCL ship and to our own where all that remained of the cruise was to watch one final sail away, pack our cases, have some dinner, grab a last few drinks, and get ready for the holiday to come to an end in Southampton the following morning.
This had been our first proper British-based cruise – we don’t count the mini ones that started up in the wake of the pandemic – and it was interesting to see some places that are reasonably close to home yet we’d mostly neglected because of that fact. Being a European itinerary it had been very port-intensive because we’re cursed with having a lot of history and culture here in a small amount of space so it hadn’t been the most relaxing of trips, but full of fabulous sights and great experiences and we’ve no complaints with what it offered overall.