Lemay garden city, Pecquencourt

The Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin can also be envisaged as a vast social laboratory, which lasted for a period of 150 years and was characterised by the abundance and the exceptional variety of the housing types created by the coal companies for their employees, from the so-called ‘corons’ (terraced rows of miners’ houses) and housing estates to garden city developments, and also including the apartment blocks of recent times.