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; €2.29). 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;
€4.27). Kids are certain to enjoy learning the principles of navigation
by operating radio-controlled boats (€0.76 for 3min). 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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