Etape 9 Royan to Ronce les Bains

I do have to eat my words – England lost tonight to Croatia in the WC semifinal. We watched the game with a few other woebegone England supporters in a small bar with a big telly. The usual England nail bighter ended in failure, outplayed by a more determined Croatian team. The French locals looked on with a superior smile and wished us ‘better luck next time my English friends’! We trudged back to the hotel in a sloth of despond and into the blast furnace which was our bedroom.

Anyway, enough about English football, here is some fabulous stuff about French architecture. Royan was partially destroyed by Allied bombing in WW2 as part of the liberation fighting. After the war the town was identified as a ‘ Laboratory of Research for Urbanism’ and as a consequence some of the buildings were constructed in the modernist style and made of the then new fangled material of reinforced concrete. The best example is the the Church of Notre Dame which was completed in 1958 and which is constructed entirely of concrete including the altar (excepting of course the 5000 sqft of stained glass windows!). The outline of the timber shuttering is still clearly visible on all the exposed concrete. The church is fantastic but, consistent with all the other churches we have visited so far in this trip, the scaffolders had arrived ahead of us and already some restoration work is underway.

Another building in the town in the modernist style is the Central Market which is also completely constructed from reinforced concrete. It is a 3 inch thick concrete skin resting on 13 peripheral supports allowing the whole internal space, which is 34ft high and 170ft diameter, to remain completely free of columns. It is like a parachute which has just landed, partially deflating and sinking to the ground. The food market inside was absolutely fantastic, bulging with lobsters, crayfish, oysters, splayed open rabbits with kidneys still attached, chickens with heads still attached, peaches the size of footballs etc.

Final architectural gem of the day – Le Phare de la Coubre – the fantastic 64m high red and white lighthouse which marks the entrance into the Gironde Estuary. It was put into service in 1905 and luckily didn’t fall down when we were in it. After climbing up the 300 sweaty, thigh-burning steps you get out at the top but it’s worth it for the view.

It has a 250W HMI lamp inside which flashes twice every 10 seconds. I am offering a special prize to the first person to tell me how far, in nautical miles, it’s light beam can stretch out into the Atlantic, and be seen. (Anybody that gets this perfectly correct has obviously cheated by checking Wikipedia and will be disqualified !). The prize is a chocolate replica of the lighthouse which might quite possibly have melted before we get back to the UK.

Here endeth the architectural lesson.