Euralille is the vast commercial and office district built between Lille's two TGV stations — Lille-Flandres and Lille-Europe — designed by Rem Koolhaas and opened in 1994 to coincide with the opening of the Channel Tunnel. The project was conceived as a new European hub city: a place where business travellers between London, Paris, and Brussels would stop, transact, and eventually linger. In practice it mostly became a very large shopping mall surrounded by office towers.
The architecture is worth seeing for its confident 1990s ambition. Koolhaas's Grand Palais at the centre — an enormous glass and steel hall — was genuinely radical in 1994, and the urban planning concept of building a mixed-use neighbourhood on rail infrastructure rather than around a motorway junction was ahead of its time. Today Euralille 1 and 2 contain over 120 shops, a concert hall (Zenith), and office space for several thousand workers. It is not a destination in itself but a useful way to understand how Lille has positioned itself as the transport hub of the cross-channel corridor.