La Chaux de Fonds

La Chaux-de-Fonds is a city designed by the watch. Rebuilt after fire in 1794 on a strict grid — streets wide for winter light, workshops on the sunny upper floors — the highest city in Switzerland became watchmaking's metropolis, and UNESCO inscribed its town plan (with neighbouring Le Locle) as a landscape shaped by a single industry: urbanism as horology. The International Watchmaking Museum, sunk in a park, keeps the finest collection of timekeepers on earth, and the great manufactures still tick in the grid.

The city's exports include people of consequence: Le Corbusier was born here and left his early villas on the hillside before leaving to redesign the century; the poet Blaise Cendrars was born a few streets away; and Louis Chevrolet carried a local watchmaking family's name to Detroit and onto a hundred million radiator grilles. For musicians the address is the Salle de musique — listed in the concert record as "Music Hall", flagged for the workbook — the concert hall of the L'Heure bleue complex, whose acoustics are ranked among Europe's finest and have made this remote Jura city a favourite of recording orchestras and piano series alike.

A grid drawn for daylight, a museum of time, a hall tuned like an instrument: La Chaux-de-Fonds runs a thousand metres up in the Jura, precisely on schedule.