Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. And yesterday I brought you a magnificent library. The new one in Helsinki in Finland. Well, today I'm inside another one in a really quite extraordinary cylinder of concrete.

I'm in La Havre in France, the French port city,

about 100 miles south of Portsmouth.

And I'm just wrapped into this cylinder of concrete.

It's designed by Oscar Niemeier.

He is the great Brazilian architect who built most of the capital of Brazil, Brasilia.

And he got to work here because Lahav was completely flattened in September 1944 as the Allied forces were

expelling the Nazi occupiers and so therefore they started from scratch and in what is the main square

in the centre of Lahav they have built where he has built a couple of huge concrete cylinders that take you and beneath ground level

the concrete I'm just looking at it here, is faced with wooden planks to get it,

to give it that wonderful, grainy texture. It's a working library. I'm just walking through

shelf after shelf of books and there's a lovely kid section over there but the main

thing is this spiral of concrete you walk down a spiral walkway then you get into a fairly kind of

conventional area about the size of a football pitch.

But then these two great concrete cylinders.

One of them is called the Volcan, the Volcano, because that is the shape of it.

And as you can tell, it's busy.

Parents bring in young children

and people sitting around enjoying the chance

just to be in a very modern and stylish building.

There's an area over here where you are just sitting and

people reading the paper with light pouring down through some glass in the roof.

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