Dieppe is a town and commune in the Seine-Maritime department and
Haute-Normandie region of France.
At the 1999 census the town had 34,653 inhabitants (Dieppois),
while the population of the whole Dieppe urban area (aire urbaine) was 81,419.
A port on the English Channel, famous for its scallops, and with a regular ferry service
from the Gare Maritime to Newhaven in England, Dieppe also has a popular pebbled beach,
a 15th-century castle and the churches of Saint Jacques and Saint Rémi.
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• Arrival
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Crowded between high cliff
headlands, DIEPPE is an enjoyably small-scale port that
used to be more of a resort. During the nineteenth century, Parisians
came here by train to take the sea air, promenading along the
front while the English colony indulged in the peculiar pastime
of swimming. These days, it's not a place many travellers go
out of their way to visit, but it's one of the nicer ferry ports
in northern France, and you're unlikely to regret
to spending an afternoon or evening here before or after a Channel
crossing. With kids in tow, the aquariums of the Cité
de la Mer are the obvious attraction; otherwise, you could settle
for admiring the cliffs and the castle as you stroll the extravagant
seafront lawns. Meanwhile, the business of the port goes on as
ever, with Dieppe's commercial docks unloading half the bananas
of the Antilles and forty percent of all shellfish destined to
slither down French throats. The markets sell fish right off
the boats, displayed with the usual Gallic flair, and the sole,
scallops and turbot available in profusion at the restaurants
may well tempt you to stay.
Modern Dieppe is still
laid out along the three axes dictated by its eighteenth-century
town planners, though these central streets have become a little
run-down, and are in any case left in continual shadow. The boulevard
de Verdun runs for over a kilometre along the seafront, from
the fifteenth-century castle in the west to the port entrance,
and passes the Casino, along with the grandest and oldest hotels.
A short way inland, parallel to the seafront, is the rue de la
Barre and its pedestrianized continuation, the Grande Rue . Along
the harbour's edge, an extension of the Grande Rue, quai Henry
IV has a colourful backdrop of cafés, brasseries and restaurants.
The place du Puits Salé
, dominated by the huge Café des Tribunaux , is at the
centre of the old town. Currently looking very spruce following
a lavish restoration, the café was built as an inn towards
the end of the seventeenth century, and briefly became Dieppe's
town hall after the previous one was bombarded by the British
in 1694. In the late nineteenth century, it was favoured by painters
and writers such as Renoir, Monet, Sickert, Whistler and Pissarro.
For English visitors, its most evocative association is with
the exiled and unhappy Oscar Wilde, who drank here regularly.
It's now a cavernous café, the haunt of college students
and open until after midnight.
As for monuments, the obvious
place to start is the medieval castle overlooking the seafront
from the west, home of the Musée
de Dieppe and two
showpiece collections (June-Sept daily 10am-noon & 2-6pm;
rest of year closed Tues). The first collection is a group of
carved ivories - virtuoso pieces of sawing, filing and chipping
of the plundered riches of Africa, shipped back to the town by
early Dieppe "explorers". The other permanent exhibition
is made up of a hundred or so prints by the co-founder of Cubism,
Georges Braque, who went to school in Le Havre, spent summers
in Dieppe and is buried just west of the town at Varengeville-sur-Mer
.
An exit from the western
side of the castle takes you out onto a path up to the cliffs
. On the other side, a flight of steps leads down to the square
du Canada , originally named in commemoration of the role played
by Dieppe sailors in the colonization of Canada. Now a small plaque is dedicated
to the Canadian soldiers who died in the suicidal 1942 raid on
Dieppe, justified later as a trial run for the 1944 Normandy
landings.
The Cité de la Mer
, at 37 rue de l'Asile-Thomas, just back from the harbour, sets
out simultaneously to entertain children and to serve as a centre
for scientific research, and succeeds in both without being all
that interesting for the casual adult visitor (daily 10am-noon
& 2-6pm). Kids are certain to enjoy learning the principles
of navigation by operating radio-controlled boats. Thereafter,
the museum traces the history of sea-going vessels, featuring
a Viking drakkar under construction, following methods depicted
in the Bayeux Tapestry. Next comes a very detailed geological
exhibition covering the formation of the local cliffs, in which
you learn how to convert shingle into sandpaper. Visits culminate
with large aquariums filled with the marine life of the Channel:
flat fish with bulbous eyes and twisted faces, retiring octopuses,
battling lobsters and hermaphrodite scallops (the white part
is male, the orange, female). Thanks to a typical lack of sentimentality,
jars of fish soup, whose exact provenance is not made explicit,
are on sale at the exit.
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