Every design for Nantes

Inside the walls of the Château des Ducs de Bretagne, the story of Nantes begins with the dukes of Brittany, who made the city their main residence in the fifteenth century before Rennes took the provincial crown. Step back out onto the street and the castle still dominates the old centre beside the Loire.

The Mémorial de l’Abolition de l’Esclavage, set along the river quay, confronts a darker chapter: in the eighteenth century Nantes was France's leading slave-trading port, and its wealth built the merchant houses of the Île Feydeau and the elegant arcades of the Passage Pommeraye. After the Revolution came decline, then shipbuilding and food processing, and the tour LU that still marks the skyline. When deindustrialisation came, the city reshaped the Île de Nantes into a place for imagination, where Les Machines de l'île now draw the crowds, and the Musée Jules Verne keeps the spirit of adventure alive.

Breton by history, Loire by geography, Nantes is a city that has reinvented itself more than once. If you carry it with you, you carry all of those versions at once, from the dukes to the dockyards.