Hands up if you’ve heard of Pau. Keep them up if you can place the town on a map of France. Oh dear. How forgetful we are. A century ago, every arm in the land would have been raised — or, at least, all those belonging to the serious newspaper-reading classes. A reasonable slice of these people would, right now, have been preparing to spend the winter season in the little spot, 15 miles short of the Pyrenees.
In its time, Pau (pronounced Poe) was quite as fashionable as Biarritz or Nice. Our great, good or just plain rich forefathers, travelling there to escape the British climate, filled the bemused backwater with crinoline, sporting societies and demands for tea and decent plumbing.
For 100 years, the place was barely out of the society pages in Britain and, later, the United States. They called it “Pau, ville anglaise”. The episode has since quite slipped out of the national consciousness. Which is strange, because — more so than Nice or even Biarritz — Pau remains influenced by its moneyed British past.
It is, for a start, both sedate and raffish, a legacy from the days when a large-scale descent by British visitors heralded Anglicanism and backgammon rather than mooning and vomit. And the people of Pau appreciate us for it. I’ve not met so many French anglophiles in an age.
Britons showed up initially for the good of their lungs. Pau’s mild, wind-free winter climate was thought just the thing for TB — quite wrongly, as the British graves in the town’s cemetery testify. Soon enough, though, fit folk from the top drawer were rolling in, unimpeded by any damned nonsense about integrating with local life.
In a remote French country town of 10,000, they simply re-created a noble British culture, complete with golf and gaming, hunting, polo and tennis, music salons, Anglican churches and English dentists. The Béarnais have subsequently reasserted themselves. They’ve got a lot to reassert — mountain traditions, a thick streak of independence (from when Pau was the capital of Navarre) and a CV including the origins of not one but two monarchies. Plus, a culinary tradition that, frankly, knocks afternoon tea into a cocked hat.
So Pau is now a provincial centre (pop 80,000), bustling with berets, southwestern ebullience and provincial dignity. But it’s content to assume its British past. Indeed, it’s taken up our aristocratic mantle as its own. The Pau Hunt still rides out, and the golf club remains right where it was founded, the first in continental Europe, in 1856. Both are almost exclusively French these days. As is Le Cercle Anglais club. Where once gay British blades “gambled high and drank hard”, Pau notables keep elements of the tradition alive — under prints of our royal family. There are few better places to get a taste of olde England, as long as you speak French.
More immediately obvious, though, is the horticulture. Piling into Pau, the Victorians brought their gardening fanaticism with them — and the Palois have picked up the baton. Private gardens billow with bushes and trees, and the huge parks, too, owe little to French custom and practice. Winter blooms are everywhere.
Plenty of reasons, then, to follow our ancestors to Pau — if not for a full winter season, then at least for a weekend. Here’s what you should be seeing.
A corner of a foreign field: to get to grips with British Pau, start at the Office de Tourisme on Place Royale — not only is it where you pick up free maps and leaflets, this town house was also home to Thomas, Earl of Selkirk, one of the first Brits in. After a lifetime devoted to settling displaced Highlanders in Canada, he got TB and ended up in Pau in 1819. He croaked a year later, but as he’d been given only days to live, this was considered pretty fair PR for the place.
Now, step into the square, elegant with lime trees for British consumption (and consumptives). Dodge round the statue of Henri IV to the bandstand. Here, 19th-century Pau musicians serenaded strollers with Rule Britannia. Yes, Rule Britannia, in France.
From there, it is but a stride to the Boulevard des Pyrénées, the grandest legacy of the British era and perhaps the loveliest promenade in France. The boulevard runs right along the edge of Pau’s plateau, looking over the river and plain and then away to a full supporting cast of Pyrenean peaks. In our heyday, every noblewoman sketched the dramatic view, every hacking poetaster scribbled about it, and, on a clear day, it still generates “a great need to relax and worry not at all about the future”.
The boulevard also boasts an Australian bar and two Irish ones, should you need to take your relaxation further. Then amble along to Beaumont Park, once an enormous private British estate, now a public greensward shaded by Californian redwoods, Himalayan cedars and very many others. Continue to the leafy Trespoey district for the mansions and slightly hallucinatory home-counties feel, before threading your way along the river to the golf club, which has clearly been transported, lock, stock and fairways, from Surrey. Anyone can play (winter-weekend green fees are £37pp, or £62 per couple; club hire £12/half-set; book on 00 33-5 59 13 18 56).
King of the castle: you’re not long in Pau before you realise that there’s no avoiding Henri IV, the king who ended France’s 16th-century religious wars and kicked off the Bourbon dynasty. Statues and pictures abound: France’s most popular sovereign was born in the castle perched dramatically on the ridge, at the western end of the Boulevard des Pyrénées.
Its medieval keep and newly cleaned Renaissance turrets and gables are, though, a lot more impressive than is the visit inside. So, stick to the outside, the formal gardens and the cracking little streets all around. Then hop to Rue Tran, where French history bumps into Swedish in a wooden-galleried house set back from the street. It is the birthplace of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who started off as a simple soldier, rose to be a Napoleonic commander and then king of Sweden. The little museum (£2.20) tells the tale well.
Treat in store: our Edward VII, not to mention every aristo in town, stopped for cakes served by the pretty maidens of the Bouzon patisserie on Rue Henri IV. The ladies are still pretty (not the same ones, of course) and the cakes (ditto) worth stopping for. Around the corner on Rue Gassion, Artigarrède sells flat almond and cream cakes, known as russes, which, as someone told me, are “world-famous throughout Pau”. Also, don’t miss the Saturday market on Place de la République, thick with food producers and Béarnais accents.
Getting there: the only flights to Pau from the UK or Ireland are operated by Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com) from Stansted, from £32 return. Alternatively, Toulouse is about 100 miles away along a good motorway. Flybe (0871 700 0535, www.flybe.com) flies to Toulouse from Belfast, Bristol and Southampton, from £68; British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) flies from Gatwick, from £68; and Aer Lingus (0818 365000, www.aerlingus.com) flies from Dublin, from €97. Alamo (0870 400 4562, www.alamo.co.uk) has three-day inclusive car hire from £106, or a week from £177. Or try Sixt (0870 155 5900, www.e-sixt.co.uk) or Hertz (0870 844 8844, www.hertz.co.uk).
Further information: Pau tourism (00 33-5 59 27 27 08, www.pau.fr).
