Lens Puts New Angle on the Louvre

From a 16th century Parisian palace to the deserted slag heaps of northern industrial France ... the decision to build an annexe of the Louvre in the depressed former mining town of Lens has taken France by surprise.

In four years' time, around 600 works of art from the Louvre's overflowing reserves are to be transported from the museum's stately buildings on the banks of the Seine to a new building, situated in one of France's most impoverished regions, due to be built on the site of a derelict coal pit.

Lens is currently a cultural desert, famous only for its football team and its deserted coal mines. The city, around 40 miles inland from Calais, was badly hit by industrial crises in the 1990s and unemployment stands at 12.7%, or three percentage points above the national average.

Le Figaro noted with wry understatement yesterday that the charms of Lens "don't necessarily explode in one's face".

But it was precisely this stark lack of charm that prompted the government's decision this week to locate Louvre II here. Announcing the city's selection, France's prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said the move came in recognition of "what this region has given our country and what this country owes to this region."

Didier Selles, a director at the Louvre, said Lens had been chosen from a shortlist of six towns in the north of France, because it was deemed to be the place most urgently in need of an injection of culture.

"We had to choose somewhere which had very little to offer culturally. The other candidate towns had good museums already," he said.

"This museum will be located between the slagheap and the old miners' houses, and it is set to play a social role."

Despite its mammoth gallery space, much of the Louvre's vast collection is hidden away in permanent storage and the government has been searching for years for a new site to expand the museum. Although security concerns will mean that star attractions like the Mona Lisa (kept permanently behind bullet-proof glass) will probably not be lent to the Lens offshoot, staff said other items on display in Paris would be shared with the northern museum.

Provisional plans suggest that the works will be rotated every three years. The annexe, set to cost €105m (£70m), will also house temporary exhibitions, a teaching area, an experimental gallery and a sculpture garden.

As well as relieving the crowded Paris Louvre, officials hope that the new building will attract an influx of tourists and cash into a region which has previously had very little to offer, thus aiding the recovery of the beleaguered industrial north.

They project that once the museum opens in spring 2009, as many as 500,000 visitors a year will be enticed to Lens, large numbers of Japanese and Chinese tourists among them.

"The Louvre in Paris has six million visitors every year, 60% of whom are tourists. The Louvre must be accessible to everyone and in Lens it will come out of its palace," Mr Selles said.

Mr Raffarin's government has made decentralisation a priority. The prime minister, who promotes himself as the champion of France d'en bas (grassroots France), has promised to correct the imbalance between the privileged metropolitan elite and the deprived rural regions.

Paris's leading modern art gallery, the Pompidou centre, has already launched a decentralisation programme and is building a sister site in Metz, north-eastern France.

Guy Delcourt, the Socialist mayor of Lens, said the decision had given the town a feeling of hope once more.

The French culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, welcomed the "symbolic" decision to relocate part of the Louvre to a region which he said had been "scarred by this country's industrial history".

The pick of what's on show in Paris

Among the artworks currently on show in the Louvre in Paris:

Paintings

Mona Lisa Leonardo da Vinci

The Turkish Bath Ingres

Raft of the Medusa Géricault

Liberty leading the people Delacroix

The Lacemaker Vermeer

Anne of Cleves Holbein

Sculptures

Winged Victory of Samothrace

Venus de Milo

Dying Slave Michelangelo

Egyptian treasures

Giant sphinx

Roomful of mummified cats, bird and fish