Lille's Hôtel de Ville is a massive Art Deco complex built in 1932, its most distinctive feature a 104-metre belfry that is the tallest belfry in France. The building replaced an earlier city hall destroyed in the First World War and was designed in a Flemish Art Deco style that bridges the gap between the region's traditional architecture and the modernist ambitions of the interwar period — stepped gables in brick, but with the clean lines and decorative restraint of Art Deco rather than the ornament of the 17th century.
The belfry can be visited, and the view from the top — across the flat Flemish plain, the Belgian border, and the industrial suburbs — gives a clear sense of the landscape that made this part of northern France both strategically vital and historically contested. The building is located south of the historic centre, a short walk from the Palais des Beaux-Arts and the Porte de Paris. The carillon in the belfry plays at regular intervals, the bells audible across much of the city centre.