|
The first weekend of September sees the annual Lille Braderie, running from early Saturday to late Sunday. The town is packed with market stalls, antiques and junk stalls, street entertainers, and an atmosphere that can seriously challenge the demophobic (fear of crowds, in case you were wondering).
In the Middle Ages, the valets and servants of the rich were allowed to sell off their employers’ surplus clothes and belongings on this weekend, but the Lille Braderie is now a huge and boisterous city-wide festival. The flea market enthusiast will spend a day happily rummaging through hundreds of stalls that line dozens of streets throughout the city – professional brocanteurs merge with local residents clearing out the attic. Shops expand on to the pavement for the weekend, and the main squares and shopping streets fill up with craft, food and clothing vendors, some with bargains, others… well you decide for yourself.
We arrived on Eurostar at 10.00 am on the Saturday, to find some stalls still setting up. By midday the town was a riot of crowds, vendors and bustle. A marathon race weaved through the streets and squares whilst French radio station TFL provided the equivalent of the Radio One road show in the central square. The Rue Roubaix was the first port of call, location of the Marché Anglais, where stallholders included a number of British dealers selling a variety of British and French collectibles. Resisting the soda siphons, but succumbing to the groovy retro 1950s record and magazine racks for 10 Euros each, we were soon heading for the other side of town.
The canal-side road that circles the Citadel is host to a large concentration of antiques and collectables dealers – 1960s Christmas decorations, old kitchenware and enamelware, advertising memorabilia as well as general toys, lamps, furniture, fixtures and fittings. In particular the Quai de Wault and Rue St Martin host some specialty retro dealers – if you really need some kitch orange plastic bedside lights and a complete pastel blue kitchen cupboard set, this is the place to come. Meanwhile, back in the centre of town, the Vieille Bourse hosts its regular book market – literature, magazines, classic French novels and ephemera in a beautiful colonnaded courtyard just a few metres away from the teeming streets outside.
And then there are the moules. Dozens of cafés and pubs offer Moules et Frites for between 8 and 10 euros, or 12 euros including a glass of beer. There is fierce competition to create the largest mound of mussel shells by the end of the weekend, and the European mussel population would do well to go in to hiding until the Braderie is over!
A slightly surreal combination of musical genres combines the City of Rochester Pipe Band and a small group of Ecuadorian Indians playing pan pipes and performing their Condor Dance for an appreciative crowd ust a few streets away. Lille’s Braderie is nothing if not multinational in scope.
By late afternoon, the crowds coming in to Lille for the evening’s entertainments are beginning to overload the capacity of the streets, and movement gets more and more difficult – if you were out anywhere in London on Millennium Eve, you will recognize this feeling. Bargain hunters may need to retire for a brief rest at this point – or simply surrender to the carnival atmosphere - returning on Sunday when the local population tries even harder to cover every available section of pavement with tempting bargains. The truly determined will carry on enoying Lille throughout the night, as some stalls and entertainments will be running without a break - a refelction of the historic origins of the Braderie, which allowed the servants from sunset to sunrise for their endeavours. You can always sleep on the train home, after all.
|
