What's special then about Dieppe?

WELL, quite a lot really. Anyway, over the centuries, many people from across the watery road to the north have been drawn by the town’s special charms to linger here awhile and even to put down roots along Normandy’s maritime fringe.

Oscar Wilde made Dieppe his first call on being released from Reading Gaol; JMW Turner traipsed along this coast with his sketchbook in search of shipwrecks to draw; Winston Churchill walked up the Rue du Faubourg de la Barre in his courtship of Clementine Hosier; the famously self-indulgent Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) came to Dieppe for dalliance; the Marquess of Salisbury, Queen Victoria’s last prime minister, spent the parliamentary recess with his bottles of scotch at his house in Puys; Walter Sickert spent time here to paint and to procreate a son with a fiery local fish-selling lady in Le Pollet; and the wise John Willett settled in a higgledy-piggledy house up the road in Thil-Mannerville with his heroic wife Ann, to polish a fine scholarship that brought together three cultures: English, French and German.

All these people enjoyed the charm of one of the most picturesque working ports in northern France; they all blended into local life and enriched the Dieppe experience. The painters found a special light in the sky here; the writers found a strange inspiration, evident even in the Belgian Georges Simenon’s eerie novel L’Homme de Londres (Newhaven-Dieppe); and, if others came only for the beer – or, more probably, the calvados – they, too, absorbed some of the magic of this special corner of France.

Dieppe is a jewel set in a larger crown. Explore and enjoy the town, whose eighteenth-century profile is largely preserved: a good way to get the feel of the place is to take an hour’s trip in Lou-Lou’s street train that starts from outside the tourist office in the summer months. But venture also beyond Dieppe. Discover the nearby quaint beaches at Pourville and Quiberville to the west; go inland only four miles to Arques-la-Bataille, where the Avenue verte opens long peaceful tracks through forests and fields to walkers and cyclists; and pop into the busy port of Le Tréport, 18 miles to the east, with its famous funicular and jovial mayor. Don’t miss, too, a visit to Rouen, one of the great cities of Europe, 45 minutes on the train from Dieppe station (a handsome edifice built by British engineers and workmen a century and a half ago).

And, while you stay in Dieppe, sit for a while on a café terrace, maybe that of the classy Tribunaux in the town centre; the busy Brazza beneath the trees at the back end of St Rémy Church (gathering place of gossiping local intellectuals after the Saturday market); Jeannot’s and Vesna’s bustling Sarajevo at the top end of the Rue de la Barre; the ever welcoming Mieux Ici Qu’en Face in Le Pollet with its fine view across the port; one of the bars on the quai Henri IV; and – only in summer - the breezy Bar O’Mètre at the western end of the seafront. It’s always a richly varied world that passes by. Get talking to it. And have another.