Roeselare

Roeselare is West Flanders on two wheels. This is the heartland of Flemish cycling religion, and the city keeps the faith's museum: KOERS, housed in the old fire station, where the relics of the sport — winged wheels, woollen jerseys, the memory of local world champion Jean-Pierre Monseré, lost at twenty-two — are displayed with the seriousness other regions reserve for altarpieces. The city's second devotion ferments in oak: the Rodenbach brewery has been maturing its Flemish red-brown ale in cathedral-sized foeders since 1821, a sour, living beer that brewers worldwide treat as a benchmark — and the Rodenbach name doubles in bronze on the main square, where the poet Albrecht Rodenbach, firebrand of the nineteenth-century Flemish student movement, holds his falcon aloft.

A prosperous market town rebuilt after the First World War — the front ran close, and nearby Passchendaele explains the region's cemeteries — Roeselare works in food, trade and logistics, its Grote Markt ringed by the belfried town hall and café terraces. Its musical life keeps the communal register the concert record describes: choirs, church music, school ensembles and the seasons of the city's cultural centre, De Spil, sustaining — in the source's fitting phrase — a tradition that survives through the community's steadfast participation. A racing museum, a sour ale, a poet with a falcon: Roeselare pedals its own course.