The Road to Hell

A word or two about cobbles. To the uninitiated, they bring to mind the faux-Dickensian charm of the English market town or the classic chic of a quiet Parisian quartier. These are not the cobbles of Paris-Roubaix. The Flemish farmers who built many of these roads were unconcerned with aesthetics and style; they simply wanted to drive their carts from one place to another, but for much of the year the tracks were muddy and impassable. So they laid substantial bricks of granite, roughly the size of a family loaf, in loosely connected patterns, just close enough to ease the passage of an animal or a steel-rimmed wooden cartwheel.


The first such roads in this area were built by the Romans, although you imagine their efforts may have been more uniform and stylish. And some others date from the heyday of the mining industry, whose remnants litter the area - disused shafts, slag heaps, rusting machinery. The cobbled tracks were buckled, beaten and distorted by coal trucks, some pulled by animals, some by gangs of men and boys. Emile Zola’s great socialist novel Germinal is set in the mining village of Mareciennes, on the edge of the Arenberg Forest where today’s racers get their first taste of the real Roubaix cobbles. Germinal paints a grim picture of life, suffering and death in the nineteenth-century mines; existence in this region has never been easy.

Cobbled roads were relatively simple to build and maintain, but their days were numbered after the invention of Tarmac in the mid 19th-century. This mixture of tar and stone chippings, developed by the Scottish engineer John McAdam, was easy to apply, waterproof, smooth and grippy – even in the wet. It was the perfect platform for that other 19th-century invention – the internal combustion engine. Together, they revolutionised the world. As motor vehicles spread across Europe, so cobbled and dirt roads disappeared under their black sticky nemesis.

Apart from the rural backwoods of Northern France, where few saw the need to spend hard-earned francs improving roads which were lightly used – and then only by cattle, tractors and the odd farm truck. And wasn’t that symbol of French practicality, the Citroen 2CV, blessed with suspension specifically designed for just such surfaces? While the main routes between towns and villages increasingly became smooth streams of tarmac, on the back roads, the cobble stayed King.