Before the soldiers came, Poperinge was a hop town and had been for five hundred years. It still is - the region produces about 80% of all Belgian hops, and the triennial September Hoppefeest takes over the cobbled square with brewery floats and brass bands and the local beer called Hommel, which is West Flemish dialect for hops. The town has always called itself hoppestad, a play on hoofdstad, which means capital. The people of Poperinge have a different nickname for themselves: keikoppen, cobble-heads, a tribute to stubbornness first recorded in 1341, when the weavers of Ypres came looking for revenge after Poperinge refused to obey a royal ban on making cloth outside the bigger town. The keikoppen ignored the ban anyway, and have continued ignoring inconvenient instructions ever since.

When the Western Front congealed into trenches in 1914, Poperinge found itself one of only two Belgian towns never occupied by the Germans. Eight miles west of Ypres, just out of range of most German artillery, it became the rear-area capital of the British sector. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers passed through what they affectionately shortened to Pop. They came back from the line for a few days of rest, drank in the estaminets in Gasthuisstraat, watched concert parties in the requisitioned cinema, queued for hot baths and clean shirts. Then they walked back up the road to Ypres. Many of them did not return. The military cemeteries that ring the town - Lijssenthoek the largest, but also Mendinghem and Dozinghem and Bandaghem, whose mock-Flemish names British soldiers invented for the casualty clearing stations - hold tens of thousands of them.

In December 1915, an Army chaplain named Philip Clayton - everyone called him Tubby - rented a townhouse at 43 Gasthuisstraat and opened it as a soldiers' club. He named it Talbot House after Lieutenant Gilbert Talbot, killed at Ypres earlier that year. The name shortened to Toc H in signaller's slang and stuck. The rules Clayton wrote on a sign by the door said everything: "All rank abandon, ye who enter here." Inside there was a piano, a reading room, fresh tea, a quiet garden, and a tiny chapel in the attic where men attended Communion before going back up the line. A general and a private waited their turn for the same cup. The piano survives. The chapel survives. The whole house survives, run today as a museum and guesthouse by the Talbot House Association, and you can still sleep in the rooms where Wilfred Owen and a million anonymous others took a few hours' refuge from the war.

The other reminder is harder. Inside the town hall, two cells were used to hold soldiers awaiting execution by firing squad - condemned for desertion in the face of the enemy, for cowardice, in some cases for falling asleep at their post. Of the 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers executed during the war, seventeen died here in Poperinge. The cells are restored and open to the public. The execution post outside still stands in its quiet courtyard. The British government issued posthumous pardons to most of these men in 2006, an acknowledgment a century late that many were not cowards but shell-shocked, that some were teenagers who had lied about their age to enlist, that the line between desertion and being unable to go on any longer was thinner than the military code allowed. The town keeps the post and the cells exactly as they were. The decision feels right.

The soldiers went home in 1918 or did not, and Poperinge went back to hops. Sint-Bertinuskerk, the medieval church with the carillon once considered among the finest in Flanders, was rebuilt yet again - it has been destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly across eight centuries, including by French troops in 1382 and an English army in 1436 and a fire in 1513. The keikoppen rebuild. Geoffrey Chaucer mentioned the town in The Tale of Sir Thopas; Charles Baudelaire dismissed it as rustic in Amœnitates Belgicæ; the Canadian poet W.W.E. Ross wrote a night piece called "Poperinghe 1917" that catches the strange quiet of a town where men slept between shifts at the front. The town's most famous modern son is Dirk Frimout, who in 1992 became Belgium's first astronaut. There is a park named after him near the centre. He grew up listening to the bells from Sint-Bertinuskerk.