Farewells in Fréthun
Saturday. A beautiful clear sunny weather all day, on both sides of the Channel, and another early start. We left for Folkestone at 06:00, to catch Le Shuttle to Calais with Monty, Ken & Bento. It’s come around all too quickly, but Kenadee is returning home to Phoenix, Arizona, to begin her nursing career. She has been such a wonderful addition to our family, we’re really going to miss her. Monty will of course be joining her once his Green Card application goes through, and in the meantime he’s planning on travelling in Japan, then Canada, where they will at least be in the same time zone, and flights much cheaper.
We’d planned to grab brunch at a little bistro — Au Refuge Gourmand in Bonningues-lès-Calais — but on arriving, we discovered they did not serve food until noon. Plan B: the McDonalds in Coquelles for a much-needed Beef & Bacon ‘Le McMuffin’ and coffee. I took Bento for a final walk around Cité Europe, while the rest of the gang explored the duty-free offerings; then it was time to drive to the TGV station in Fréthun. We said our goodbyes — really quite sad, as it’ll be at least a year till we see Kenadee again, and probably even longer for Bento. Vanessa & I headed back to Le Shuttle for our return crossing and arrived home around 2pm.
Coquelles and Cité Europe
Coquelles is a small commune in the Pas-de-Calais department, sitting just a couple of miles south-west of Calais itself, on what was for centuries little more than quiet agricultural land defined by the region's distinctive chalk geology — the same chalk seams that run beneath the English Channel and famously gave the engineers of the Channel Tunnel something relatively straightforward to bore through. The name Coquelles is thought to derive from the Old French coquille, meaning "shell," likely a reference to the abundance of fossilised shells found in the chalky soil of the surrounding hills. For most of its history the village was an unremarkable farming settlement; its destiny changed entirely in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it was selected as the French terminal point for the Channel Tunnel. The construction of the Tunnel — which opened in May 1994 — transformed the area almost overnight into a major international transit hub, and Coquelles found itself suddenly at the centre of one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the twentieth century.
The Channel Tunnel itself is a remarkable piece of work, stretching 50.46 kilometres (31.35 miles) beneath the sea, making it the longest undersea tunnel in the world. Proposals for a fixed link between England and France had been circulating since at least 1802, but it took almost two centuries of false starts, cancelled schemes, and political wrangling before the Treaty of Canterbury was finally signed by Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand in February 1986, authorising construction to begin. Eleven tunnel boring machines worked simultaneously from both sides of the Channel, cutting through the chalk marl at depth. On 1 December 1990 — in a moment that captured the world's attention — Englishman Graham Fagg and Frenchman Philippe Cozette broke through the final wall of the service tunnel as cameras rolled. A BBC commentator declared Fagg "the first man to cross the Channel by land for 8,000 years." The first car shuttles for the public ran on 22 December 1994, and today LeShuttle and Eurostar services carry tens of millions of passengers a year through its three tunnels.
Cité Europe
Cité Europe, the large shopping and leisure complex directly adjacent to the Eurotunnel terminal, opened on 21 March 1995 — approximately ten months after the Tunnel itself — and was designed by architect Paul Andreu, whose brief was to create something that would echo the form and ambition of the Tunnel. It offers over 140 shops, a large Carrefour hypermarket, a twelve-screen cinema, and around twenty restaurants, with free parking for more than 4,000 cars. For British day-trippers and cross-Channel travellers in the 1990s, Cité Europe became almost an institution: a place to load up on wine, cheese, and cheap cigarettes before queuing for the shuttle home. The Carrefour alone is one of the largest hypermarkets in the entire Hauts-de-France region. These days the complex is perhaps a little quieter than its heyday, the duty-free gold rush having long faded, but it remains a perfectly decent spot for a wander or a meal while waiting for a train — and the McDonalds, it must be said, delivers exactly what you need at seven in the morning.
Calais: A Brief History
It is worth pausing for a moment on the broader story of Calais, because it is a place with a surprisingly rich and turbulent past — and one that sits in a peculiarly intimate relationship with England. The town began as a modest fishing settlement on an island bordered by marshes and tidal channels, improved by the Count of Flanders in 997 and fortified more substantially by the Count of Boulogne in 1224. Its location — at the narrowest crossing point of the English Channel, just 34 kilometres from the cliffs of Dover — made it strategically invaluable, and coveted.
The defining episode of Calais's medieval history came during the Hundred Years' War. Following his decisive victory at the Battle of Crécy in August 1346, Edward III of England marched north and laid siege to Calais. The siege lasted nearly a year, the city's population eventually starved into submission. The terms of surrender gave rise to one of the most celebrated moments of chivalric drama in the medieval record: Edward demanded that six of the town's leading citizens walk out barefoot, wearing nooses around their necks, carrying the keys to the city — presumably to be executed as punishment for the town's stubborn resistance. Six burghers volunteered, led by the merchant Eustache de Saint-Pierre. According to the chronicler Jean Froissart, it was only the intercession of Edward's queen, Philippa of Hainault, that spared their lives. Auguste Rodin immortalised this moment in one of his most celebrated sculptures, commissioned by the city of Calais in 1884 and completed in 1889; a casting stands in Calais to this day, and another — perhaps the most famous — stands in the Victoria Tower Gardens beside the Houses of Parliament in London.
Calais remained an English possession — the so-called Pale of Calais — for over two hundred years, becoming what contemporaries called "the brightest jewel in the English crown," a crucial gateway for the wool and textile trades whose customs revenues at times accounted for a third of the English Crown's entire income. It was finally retaken by France in January 1558, when 30,000 French troops under Francis, Duke of Guise, moved swiftly on the city. The loss struck so deeply that Queen Mary I is said to have declared that when she died, the word "Calais" would be found engraved on her heart. The town was fully French again from that point, and grew steadily as a port and later, in the nineteenth century, as a centre of the lace industry — skilled workers from Nottingham having smuggled the first mechanised tulle looms across the Channel in 1816, laying the foundations of a trade that defined the city for well over a century.
The Gare de Calais-Fréthun
Just a short drive from Coquelles and Cité Europe, the Gare de Calais-Fréthun is Calais's TGV and international rail station, opened in 1993 as an integral part of the new LGV Nord high-speed line and built specifically to complement the Channel Tunnel. It sits close to the tunnel entrance and handles both Eurostar international services and TGV trains south to Paris and beyond. Unlike the older Calais-Ville station in the town centre, Fréthun is purely a high-speed and long-distance facility — a quiet, functional place at the edge of the chalk plain, with the kind of purposeful, slightly windswept atmosphere that international border stations tend to acquire. Passengers travelling to the UK from here pass through both French exit checks and UK Border Force entry controls before boarding — juxtaposed controls, established under an agreement signed in 2000, meaning that by the time you arrive at St Pancras, you are already cleared.
