City Bridge
Until October 1749, Arras was made up of two distinct agglomerations, the City, built around and on the grounds of the Saint Vaast Abbey, and the City, on the Baudimont hill, placed under the jurisdiction of the Bishop.
The city and the City were separated by a discharge channel, certainly dug during the construction of the ramparts in the 12th century, the Burien moat. We passed from the city to the city by the Porte de Cité, located at the end of the rue Saint-Aubert towards rue de Turenne. We crossed the Burien ditch by a bridge, the Pont de Cité, which gave its name to the place built there after the removal of this fortification at the beginning of the XlXth century.
It is on this fortification that the miraculous Calvary of Arras was located in the 17th century, whose head of Christ, saved from destruction in 1799 and in 1915, is now kept in the Cathedral Treasury.
The Fountain of Neptune was erected in 1864-1865. It is the work of François Constant Auguste Bourgois, born in Arras on November 20, 1801. It is installed by the water company to provide drinking water to the inhabitants because the consumption of polluted water from the Crinchon was hitherto ta cause of numerous cholera epidemics which ravaged the urban populations.
The district heavily affected by the bombings of the First World War will be rebuilt in the 1930s and again destroyed during the German bombings of May 1940.