Rue du Gros-Horloge Rouen
— — a clock with one hand, gold above the street.
Not only on a wall.
“A gilded clock with a single hand keeps the hour above this lane in old Rouen. The Gros-Horloge has straddled the street on its Renaissance arch since 1527, though the works behind the dial were running more than a century before that. The street runs from the cathedral square to the old market, the Place du Vieux-Marché, where Joan of Arc was burned in 1431, a short walk away. Half-timbered houses lean over the arch in colombage rows. The street has been pedestrian since the early seventies, one of the first in France. Shoppers pass under the clock without looking up. The clock does not mind.
Rue du Gros-Horloge Rouen, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Rue du Gros-Horloge runs through Rouen's medieval old town, between the Cathédrale Notre-Dame and the Place du Vieux-Marché, in Normandy. Rouen is the historic capital of the region, on the Seine about 135 km northwest of Paris. The street takes its name from the gilded clock, the Gros-Horloge, that has spanned its width since 1527, set into a Renaissance arch by the architect Jacques Lesueur. The street was pedestrianised in 1971, among the earliest in France, and is the main commercial spine of the old quarter. The cathedral at the eastern end is the building Claude Monet painted in series, around thirty times, between 1892 and 1894.
The arch carrying the clock is the 1527 work of Jacques Lesueur, in the early French Renaissance style: a low semicircular vault decorated with classical reliefs, beside the older belfry tower and above the street. The clock face measures around 2.5 metres across and is gilded, with a single hand showing the hour. The street it crosses is lined with colombage houses, timber-framed Norman buildings of the 15th to 18th centuries, many leaning slightly into the lane above the paving. The belfry beside the clock was built in 1389 and is older than the arch by more than a century.
The clock and the belfry can be visited together: ticket-holders climb the medieval belfry stair to the clock's mechanism, then continue to a panoramic terrace over the rooftops of old Rouen. The works inside are the original 14th-century movement, one of the oldest functioning clock mechanisms in Europe, restored between 1997 and 2006. The street below is closed to vehicles and busy with shoppers most afternoons. The early morning is the quiet hour, before the shops open. The cathedral square is a five-minute walk one way; the Place du Vieux-Marché, with its modern church marking the site of Joan of Arc's execution in 1431, is five minutes the other.