Arras Memorial and Faubourg d'Amiens Cemetery

The Faubourg d'Amiens Cemetery and Arras Memorial are on the western edge of the city, a ten-minute walk from the train station. The cemetery is a large CWGC site with over 2,600 graves, the headstones set in a gently curved layout against a long wall. The adjacent memorial bears the names of 35,000 missing soldiers — an enormous number even by the standards of the Arras sector.

The memorial is architecturally significant as well as historically: it was designed by Edwin Lutyens and opened in 1932. The stone arches and colonnades are characteristic Lutyens, measured and dignified without being cold. The visit is free and the site is always open. It is the most reflective of Arras's war sites and the one that best communicates the scale of the losses, without the competition for headspace you get at Vimy Ridge.

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The Arras Memorial records the names of 35,000 men who were killed on the Arras sector of the Western Front between spring 1916 and August 1918 and have no known grave. The Flying Services Memorial on the same site commemorates nearly a thousand airmen — from the Royal Flying Corps, Royal Naval Air Service, and the air forces of the Dominions — who died in this sector and have no known grave, making it one of the few memorials in the world dedicated specifically to fallen aviators from that war.