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The Birthplace of Charles de Gaulle is the town house at 9 rue Princesse in Old Lille where the future general and president was born on 22 November 1890, in the home of his maternal grandparents. Opened as a museum in 1983, it shows rooms furnished as in the late 19th century and traces his family, childhood and career.

Lille Cathedral, Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille, is a Gothic Revival church begun in 1854 to house a 12th-century statue of the Virgin long venerated in the city. Built in stages over almost 150 years, it became a cathedral in 1913, and its modern west front, designed by architect Pierre-Louis Carlier with engineer Peter Rice, was completed in 1999.

The Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille is the city's museum of fine arts, founded in 1809 and housed since 1892 in a palace on Place de la République designed by Édouard Bérard and Fernand Delmas. Its collections include paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Goya, Delacroix and Courbet, 19th-century sculpture and 18th-century relief models of fortified towns.