One of the many wonderful things about Northern France is how easy it is to reach from the UK. Lille is under 90 minutes from London by Eurostar, which makes this corner of northern France perfect for a weekend break.
Some of my favourite places to visit along this northern slice of France include Arras, Le Touquet, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Calais. New to this list is the city of Lens. I enjoyed two days exploring this former coal mining town and am happy to report that it’s the perfect spot for a weekend break.
If you are planning a trip to northern France or are simply looking for a place to stop on a drive towards southern France or the Alps then here’s everything you need to know about spending time in Lens, France.
*Updated for 2027
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Table of Contents
Lens at a glance
Why visit Lens?
Lens was once a major production area for France’s coal mining industry. For nearly three centuries, life in Lens and the surrounding towns was focused entirely on excavating charbon from the ground. When the last pit closed in 1990, the region’s economy crashed: shops closed, houses were abandoned and the unemployment rate in Lens was three times the national average.
Today, however, that has changed and it’s thanks to the arrival in December 2012 of the Louvre-Lens Museum, a branch of the famed Louvre Museum in Paris.
The arrival of the Louvre-Lens Museum helped to breathe new life into the town creating not only employment opportunities – both at the museum and in the wider Lens area – but also giving the town and its people a renewed sense of pride and identity. Around it is a landscape that UNESCO has recognised as part of the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin, a 120-kilometres of pithead frames, workers’ housing and towering slag heaps that you can now visit, and even climb.
Add some of the region’s best Art Deco architecture (most of Lens was rebuilt after being almost entirely destroyed in the First World War), hearty northern French food and easy access from London, and you’ll find that Lens makes the perfect weekend break.
How to spend a weekend in Lens, France
This guide is aimed at helping you discover the best things to do in Lens, France over two days. There’s a lot to see and do and the following is a guideline for making the most of your time here.
Day 1 in Lens
How you organise your first day in Lens depends on when you arrive. I took the 9am Eurostar from London and arrived in Lille just before 11.30am. From Lille it’s an approximately 30 minutes by train to Lens. However, you can follow the below itinerary regardless of when you arrive – even better if you can dedicate two full days to exploring the town.
Morning: Louvre-Lens Museum
Your first port of call should be the Louvre-Lens Museum.
The Lens outpost of the Louvre Museum is very different to its glamorous Parisian sibling. While the glass pyramids and historical buildings of the Louvre sit on banks of the River Seine, the Louvre-Lens Museum sits on the site of an old coal mine.
The building – a single-storey glass and aluminium structure – was designed by Japanese architect firm SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) in collaboration with Imrey Culbert, and was purposely designed to blend in rather than stand out. It opened on 4 December 2012.
There are two gallery spaces at the Louvre Lens Museum, the permanent Gallery of Time (Galerie du Temps) and the temporary exhibition space.
Some 250 works of art from the Louvre in Paris are displayed in the Gallery of Time, organised in chronological order. Typically, 5 to 10 per cent of the works are swapped with new pieces from the Louvre’s archives every year but to celebrate the museum’s 12th birthday in December 2024, the collection was renewed in its entirety.
Highlights of the new exhibition include The Four Seasons by Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Portrait of Luis Maria de Cistue et Martinez by Francisco de Goya.
The museum also runs two big temporary exhibitions a year. So Cute! The Art of Happiness runs until 18 January 2027.
You can easily spend half a day at the Louvre Lens, if not longer, especially if you visit both exhibition spaces. Just be aware when planning your trip to Lens that the museum, like many in France, is closed on Tuesdays.
The museum is open 10am to 6pm, closed Tuesdays. The main exhibition, the Galerie du Temps is free for everyone, and only temporary exhibitions charge.
Lunch: L’Atelier du Cerisier
There is a cafe in the museum as well as a picnic space but I highly recommend making a reservation at L’Atelier du Cerisier, a glass-fronted circular restaurant that’s part brasserie part fine dining and sits within the museum grounds, opposite the entrance. It’s part of the Michelin-starred Cerisier restaurant in Lille and lunch was excellent when I visited. L’Atelier du Cerisier is open Wednesday to Monday.
Afternoon: the Miners’ Village
Once you have finished exploring the Louvre-Lens Museum then there are a couple of options for the afternoon. The first is to wander across the road towards the Louvre-Lens Hotel and explore the streets around the hotel.
Miners’ Village
The streets surrounding the Louvre-Lens Museum are a step back in time. Each mining company would establish a small town surrounding the mine with cottages for the miners, a doctor’s office, a church, a school, cinemas, concert halls, and green spaces for children to play and for families to spend time together. The theory being, of course, that the more facilities miners had on their doorstep, the less need they had to leave the area.
The Stade Bollaert-Delelis, the Bollaert-Delelis Stadium, was first built in 1932 by one of the local mining companies and it’s been home to the Racing Club de Lens (RC Lens) football team ever since. If football is your thing then the Tourist Office runs tours of the stadium.
Wander along the streets near the museum and you will see former miners’ cottages that have been (or are in the process of being) repaired and renovated as well as the larger homes once belonging to the doctor, engineers and pit managers – the house sizes growing in proportion with a person’s job title.
Art Deco Tour
Depending on time you may also want to join one of the Art Deco architecture tours run by the Tourist Office. At the very least, stop by the Tourist Office in the centre of town. Lodged in a former shop, the Art Deco decor is some of the prettiest in town. Ninety percent of Lens was destroyed during the First World War and so most of the architecture dates from after the 1920s.
The Tourist Office has a small shop selling crafts made by local artisans and they also have a small second-hand area. Sadly, the set of elegant green stem wine glasses – for only 5 euros! – were too fragile to come with me on my trip.
The hour-long Art Deco tours take place at 3.30pm from Wednesday to Sunday and include the Lens train station with its Art Deco mosaic paying tribute to the town’s mining legacy. The office also run a Museum and Mines tour at 2pm, also from Wednesday to Sunday.
Day 2 in Lens: Climb the 11/19 slag heaps
Your second day in Lens is all about the mines. Starting from the Belgian border, the mining basin spread west for 120km and was peppered with countless mines. Today, the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin has been recognised as a living and evolving cultural landscape by UNESCO. Of the many quarries once involved with extracting coal from the ground, four remain today and are open to visitors.
You really need a car for getting around today alternatively you can use the local buses.
Morning
We visited the 11/19 Pit first on a very wet and windy November morning.
The colliery, in the nearby town of Loos, is home to two pits, Number 11 and Number 19. Digging on pit number 11 started in 1891 but the iron A-Frame that sits above it came later in the 1920s, after the First World War (the mines were all destroyed by the Germans during WWI).
Following the Second World War, the private mining companies were bough by the state who needed to increase energy production in a country ravaged by war. They built the enormous concrete tower standing behind pit number 11 and soon this, pit number 19, had replaced the original mine. With four lifts and an extraordinarily powerful engine, it was able to extract coal at a rate not seen before.
But where the private companies had used architecture and design to reflect their wealth and power (the A-Frame of Number 11 is really quite elegant, topped with a pair of traditional tools cast from iron), that state was less interested in design aesthetic and more in getting as much coal out of the ground as quickly as possible
There are no buildings open to the public here, most are office spaces dedicated to sustainable development, but you can climb the nearby twin slag heaps (terrills jumeaux), of Loos-en-Gohelle.
There are 51 slag heaps – essentially the waste produced from coal mining – still standing in Northern France but these twin black conical hills are the tallest in Europe.
One is open for visitors to climb and there was a brief pause in the rain while we made our way to the top. The views weren’t as far-reaching as they would have been on a summer’s day (on a clear day, views stretch for 30 kilometres) but we still got an impressive 360-degree view of the countryside.
What’s most surprising about these slag heaps is that they support growth and various plants and even trees are growing on them.
Lunch: Al’ Fosse 7
The wind and rain picked up as we were descending from the top of the slag heap so I was wet through by the time we arrived at Al’ Fosse 7 in the town of Avion.
This popular local restaurant is designed to resemble a mine shaft and filled with memorabilia from black and white photos of miners in the pits, old lanterns hanging from the walls, and miner’s clothes hung from hooks dangling from the ceiling, as they once were at the end of a shift.
The food is very traditional, hearty and filling. I tried the Welsch Complet, the Northern France version of a Welsh rarebit (essentially melted cheese on toast for anyone unfamiliar).
Well, that is what I had been told but the reality is that the dish is more like a fondue, made with cheddar cheese, beer-soaked bread, ham and a poached egg. It arrived with frites and a green salad and was tasty but it was a little too filling for me to finish the entire thing.
Afternoon: 9-9bis Pit
To get a sense of how the mines operated it’s well worth going the 9-9bis pit at Oignies. Almost 5 million tonnes of coal was extracted from here between the years of 1933 and 1990 and, in its heyday, some 2,500 miners worked here.
Some of the original buildings are open to visitors on a guided tour, providing a fascinating step back in time. Little has changed in these buildings since the 1930s: the hulking great machines used to power and monitor the mine are still standing and the engine that raised and lowered the mine lift still functions.
The miner’s old bathhouse is today a contemporary space with music studios and a dance space but there’s also an evocative display of dozens of old miner’s clothes hanging from ceiling by hooks as they once did when coal was king. This was one of my favourite stops during my time in Lens.
Other things to do in and around Lens
- Tour the nearby memorial sites of the First and Second World Wars. The Canadian Memorial at Vimy, is 9km away, and Canada’s principal national war memorial in Europe, honouring those who served in the First World War.
- Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, is a major World War I remembrance complex on the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette hill. Located 12km from Lens, it consists of three main areas: the History Centre; the Ring of Remembrance that lists , in alphabetical order, the names of 579,606 fallen soldiers from 40 different countries and nationalities who died in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region during World War I; and the National Necropolis. The latter is the largest French military cemetery and holds the remains of over 42,000 soldiers.
- Visit the town of Arras, famous for its elegant market squares, its UNESCO-listed Belfry, its giants, and the Wellington Tunnels.
- Spend a day in nearby Bruay-La-Buissière with its elegant Grand Place, its wonderful Art Deco swimming pool (Piscine de Bruay-La-Buissière) and La Cité des Électriciens (The Electricians City), an excelent example of a former mining city.
- The Centre Historique Minier (Lewarde Mining History Museum) is the region’s biggest mining museum, set on the site of the old Delloye colliery at Lewarde.
Where to stay in Lens
Louvre Lens Hotel
The best hotel in Lens is the four-star Louvre Lens Hotel. The property sits within a row of old miner’s houses directly opposite the Louvre Lens Museum and is a really lovely place to stay.
It’s a member of the Esprit de France hotel group that blends hospitality with art and culture and the 52 sleek, modern and very comfortable rooms pay tribute to the region’s coal mining heritage with exposed wood and brick and dark colours. The hotel restaurant, Le Galibot, refers to the name used for young, novice miners.
Appart Hotel Gambetta
If you prefer the freedom of having your own kitchen then the Appart Hotel Gambetta is a good option. Located less than 1km from the Louvre Lens Museum and the Bollaert-Delelis Stadium, the Aparthotel rooms come with fully equipped kitchens as well as a terrace or balcony.
ibis Styles Lens Centre Gare
Conveniently located near the train station, the ibis Styles Lens Centre Gare is a reliable option with comfortable rooms (including family rooms), luggage storage and a tasty breakfast. It might not have the same sense of history at the Louvre Lens Hotel but it’s a solid and reliable choice.
How to get to Lens, France
Lens is easy to reach by train. It’s just 30 to 40 minutes from Lille, approximately 45 minutes from Arras, between 1 hour 10 minutes and 1 hour 37 minutes from Paris, and just under two hours from Brussels.
I took the Eurostar from London St Pancras International in Kings Cross at 9am, arriving in Lille Europe 1 hour 22 minutes later. From there I took a local train from Lille Flandres to Lens. The Lille Flandres train station is a quick 5-minute walk from Lille Europe and is well signposted.
If travelling by ferry, Lens is a little over an hour’s drive from Calais.
