"It is the image of the past and the railway culture" : threatened with ruin, the Florentine Tower of Hirson is in ple

This building from the 1920s has been significantly damaged over time. Thanks to the Mission Berne, it is benefiting from a restoration which will be completed next year. A project for unusual lodgings is also being considered.

The Florentine Tower in Aisne is an atypical testimony to Hirson’s rich railway past. Thanks to the Heritage Lottery, this former signal box, classified as a historic monument, has the right to a restoration at a total cost of two million euros.

Threatened with ruin and in “imminent danger”, this 45 meter high building is now benefiting from a makeover. At the very top, workers have been working for several months to rebuild its very degraded structure. “It was worn out by time, a lack of coating at the time, so it was time we intervened“, says Victor Ramolu, site manager.

Their goal is to “restore all the concrete and mortar of the tower, as well as the bricks“For example, they treated and changed the damaged scrap metal of a pole, re-coated them before applying a product to protect them before re-coating them, “to pour them back into concrete and restore them to their initial shape“.

The Florentine Tower is originally a signal tower rebuilt after the First World War. Until 1969, the building of the Chemins de fer du Nord company controlled the tracks of a vast railway complex. But it posed structural problems, “essentially on the concrete, like all the buildings of that era“, explains Nathalie T’Kint, heritage architect.

Indeed, like all buildings of that era, the metal structures were very close to the exterior facing, which is why a heavy restoration was carried out. The scrap metal is stripped bare, the cracks opened, the elements are passivated and restored.

“What is important in a building is to restore it, indeed, but also to maintain it, and for that, it must have a functioncontinues the architect. So, here, there is an unusual housing project. We are at the stage of discussions with the security commissions to see if it is feasible.“

This project was also selected by the Loto du Patrimoine, because it is “of industrial heritage, therefore it is one of the only and only Florentine towers that still exist in our territory currently“, underlines Frédéric de Rumigny, territorial delegate of the Heritage Foundation.

“It is testimony to an era, which is about a century old, where we were in the industrial world, in the railway world, it was one of the second railway hubs in the country“, he adds.

For his part, Jean-Jacques Thomas, president of the Community of Communes of Three Rivers, is delighted with such a project. This Florentine tower, in his eyes, is not only the image of the past, it is “our own belfry“, but also the representation of the railway culture. The work must be completed at the beginning of 2027 with the reinstallation of the large clock. The lodge project, for its part, should see the light of day in the following years.

With Rémi Vivenot / FTV