reconstructed center of Le Havre
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Le Havre is a port on the English Channel in Normandy. In September 1944, in the battle to take the German-held port, the town was heavily bombed and shelled, and about 2,000 French civilians were killed. When the garrison of some 11,000 men surrendered on 12 September, the centre of the town was almost entirely destroyed.
In 1945 the city commissioned the architect Auguste Perret and his studio to rebuild the whole centre. His first plan was rejected as too ambitious, and a modified one was built until 1964. It relied on a modular grid, prefabrication and concrete, while keeping traces of the old street pattern and the historic buildings that survived.
St Joseph's Church, built from 1951 to 1958, has a tower 107 metres high and stained glass by Marguerite Huré. The tower of the City Hall went up between 1953 and 1958. Perret died in Paris on 25 February 1954, and the rebuilt city was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2005.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).