Place des Martyrs

Nobody calls this the Place des Martyrs. To the city it is the Rousegäertchen, the little rose garden, for the red roses that fill its beds all summer, and it is the one green square in the quarter the railway built. It was laid out in the 1920s, when the Avenue de la Liberté was becoming the grandest street in the country and the ARBED steel company was building its palace across the road.

The names are the history of the years after the First World War: the square is for the martyrs, and the streets around it are the Rue de la Grève, for a strike, and the Rue du Plébiscite, for the referendum of 1919, when Luxembourgers voted to keep their Grand Duchess and their independence at a moment when both were in doubt. Three paths cross the garden and meet at a single point in front of the steel company's door, and at that point, since the 1980s, has stood a bronze by Henry Moore: "Mother and Child", made in 1983 and 1984. It is one of the last works of the greatest British sculptor of the century, and it sits in a rose bed in Luxembourg, facing the steel company's door. There is a car park under the roses — that was the 1980s too.

Sit on a bench here at lunchtime, with the bank clerks and the roses and the traffic on the avenue, and you are in the Luxembourg that the trains made: not the fortress on the rock across the valley, but the money that came after.