The district facing the château from across the Maine is known as La Doutre (literally, "the other side"), and still has a few mansions and houses dating from the medieval period, despite redevelopment over the years.

 

In the north of the area, a short way from the Pont de la Haute-Chaine (about 15 minutes' walk from the château), the Hôpital St-Jean , at 4 bd Arago, was built by Henry Plantagenet in 1174 as a hospital for the poor, a function it continued to fulfil until 1854. Today it houses the Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine (June to mid-Sept daily 9am-6.30pm; rest of year Tues-Sun 10am-noon & 2-6pm; 20F/3.05), which contains the city's great twentieth-century tapestry, Le Chant du Monde . The tapestry sequence was designed by Jean Lurçat in 1957 in response to the Apocalypse tapestry, though he died nine years later before its completion (the artist's own commentary is available in English). It hangs in a vast vaulted space, the original ward for the sick, or Salle des Malades. The first four tapestries deal with La Grande Menace , the threat of nuclear war: first the bomb itself; then Hiroshima Man , flayed and burnt with the broken symbols of belief dropping from him; then the collective massacre of the Great Charnel House ; and the last dying rose falling with the post-Holocaust ash through black space - the End of Everything . From then on, the tapestries celebrate the joy of life and the interdependence of its myriad manifestations: fire, water, champagne, the conquest of space, poetry and symbolic language.

Modern tapestry is an unfamiliar art, and the colours and Lurçat's style are so unlike anything else that initially you may be overwhelmed. More predictable is the impressive old hospital building with its seventeenth-century pharmacy, the chapel's fine thirteenth-century stained-glass windows and soaring Gothic vaulting. The Romanesque cloisters, with their original woodwork intact, are also worth a peek. There are more modern tapestries, too, in the building adjoining the Salle des Malades: built up around the donation by Lurçat's widow of several of his paintings, ceramics, other tapestries and illustrations for Le Chant du Monde , it has become one of the best showcases for contemporary tapestry in a changing programme of exhibitions. If you want to see the different stages involved in carrying out a modern tapestry commission or restoring old tapestries, call in at the neighbouring Centre Régional d'Art Textile , 3 bd Daviers ( ateliers Mon, Tues, Thurs & Fri 10am-noon & 2-4pm; exposition Tues-Sat 2-6pm; free), where you can watch artists at work.

South of the Hôpital St-Jean, on La Doutre's central square, place de la Laiterie, the ancient buildings of the Abbaye de Ronceray are used as an art and technology college, and when the school mounts exhibitions (or if you take one of the tourist office's guided tours of the town) you can visit the Romanesque galleries of the old abbey and admire their beautiful murals. Inside the adjacent twelfth-century church of the Trinity on the square, an exquisite Renaissance wooden spiral staircase fails to mask a great piece of medieval bodging used to fit the wall of the church around a part of the abbey that juts into it.