This area has been a fishing district since the Middle Ages. Spared by the fire that ravaged the town in 1694, the Pollet District is home to modest homes made of flint arranged along narrow, winding streets. The district has been deeply marked by the industrialization of the port and, beginning in 1880, by a man-made channel leading to the commercial docks and dividing the port in two. The Pollet is now the centre of a modernization programme encompassing the construction and renovation of port facilities.