Modern Dieppe is still laid out along the three axes dictated by its eighteenth-century town planners, though these central streets have become a little run-down. The boulevard de Verdun runs for over a kilometre along the seafront, from the fifteenth-century castle in the west to the port entrance, and passes the Casino, along with the grandest and oldest hotels. A short way inland, parallel to the seafront, is the rue de la Barre and its pedestrianized continuation, the Grande Rue. Along the harbour's edge, an extension of the Grande Rue, quai Henry IV has a colourful backdrop of cafés, brasseries and restaurants.The place du Puits Salé, at the centre of the old town, is dominated by the huge, restored Café des Tribunaux, built as an inn towards the end of the seventeenth century. Two hundred years later, it was favoured by painters and writers such as Renoir, Monet, Sickert, Whistler and Pissarro. For English visitors, its most evocative association is with the exiled and unhappy Oscar Wilde, who drank here regularly. It's now a cavernous café, the haunt of college students and open until after midnight. As for monuments, the obvious place to start is the medieval castle overlooking the seafront from the west, home of the Musée de Dieppe and two showpiece collections (June–Sept daily 10am–noon & 2–6pm; Oct–May Mon & Wed–Sat 10am–noon & 2–5pm, Sun 10am–noon & 2–5pm; €2.50). The first collection is a group of carved ivories – virtuoso pieces of sawing, filing and chipping of the plundered riches of Africa, shipped back to the town by early Dieppe "explorers". The other permanent exhibition is made up of a hundred or so prints by the co-founder of Cubism, Georges Braque, who went to school in Le Havre, spent summers in Dieppe and is buried just west of the town at Varengeville-sur-Mer. Other galleries upstairs hold paintings of local scenes by the likes of Pissaro, Renoir, Dufy, Sickert and Boudin, while a separate much newer wing of the castle stages temporary exhibitions. An exit from the western side of the castle takes you out onto a path up to the cliffs. On the other side, a flight of steps leads down to the square du Canada, originally named in commemoration of the role played by Dieppe sailors in the colonization of Canada. Now a small plaque is dedicated to the Canadian soldiers who died in the suicidal 1942 raid on Dieppe, justified later as a trial run for the 1944 Normandy landings. The Cité de la Mer, at 37 rue de l'Asile-Thomas, just back from the harbour, sets out simultaneously to entertain children and to serve as a centre for scientific research, and succeeds in both without being all that interesting for the casual adult visitor (daily 10am–noon & 2–6pm; €4.30). Kids are certain to enjoy learning the principles of navigation by operating radio-controlled boats (€1 for 3min). Thereafter, the museum traces the history of sea-going vessels, featuring a Viking drakkar under construction, following methods depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. Next comes a very detailed geological exhibition covering the formation of the local cliffs, in which you learn how to convert shingle into sandpaper. Visits culminate with large aquariums filled with the marine life of the Channel: flat fish with bulbous eyes and twisted faces, retiring octopuses, battling lobsters and hermaphrodite scallops (the white part is male, the Orange, female). A lack of sentimentality means that jars of fish soup, whose exact provenance is not made explicit, are on sale at the exit.
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