Courée Cacan

The Courée Cacan is a narrow, enclosed courtyard tucked behind the grand facades of the old law faculty in Lille. It remains one of the last examples of the city's nineteenth-century industrial worker housing, where families lived in tiny, single-room homes packed around a shared central space. When the university expanded into these blocks, they preserved the courtyard rather than demolishing it. Students now cross through this quiet, brick-lined passage to reach their lecture halls, stepping directly between two very different centuries.