Church of Saint Joan of Arc

A startling modern church on the Place du Vieux-Marché, the spot where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431. The architecture is genuinely strange — sweeping curved roofs in slate and lead, like a great fish or an upturned boat — and stands in sharp contrast to the half-timbered houses around it.

Inside, the glass is the surprise: thirteen tall windows of 16th-century stained glass rescued from a nearby church bombed in the war, reset in the modern walls and reaching the full height of the nave. A small bronze cross outside marks the exact spot of Joan's pyre.

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The architect Louis Arretche designed the church in the 1970s to evoke the upturned hull of a Viking longship — a reference both to Rouen's Norman origins and to the pyre on which Joan was burned in 1431. The stained glass inside was salvaged from the church of Saint-Vincent, destroyed in the wartime bombing.

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