Walks near Paris
A Walk through a Paris Working Class Suburb
Having visited the Ile de Brise a few weeks ago, we are inviting you to follow us today on another spontaneous walking trip to the outskirts of Paris – one with a difference, however, inasmuch as we will be climbing down several notches on the social ladder.
Which is why, instead of boats and landscaped gardens, today we offer you allotments and scruffy municipal parks. And high-rise buildings. There is not a single place on this walk where you don’t see at least one of those.
I got the itinerary of the walk from a book called “Balades dans la nature” – which only goes to show that the French word “la nature” is only a very loose translation of its English counterpart. As a matter of fact, there is practically no “nature” (in the English sense) at all on this walk.
I must also warn you that the walk is interesting, by which I mean culturally interesting, rather than pretty – and that much of its interest lies in the fact that it is a good and relatively safe way of taking a peek at the dreaded “cités”, the French public housing estates that were made famous throughout the world some years ago by Mathieu Kassovitz’s daunting and terrifying movie “La Haine“
The walk starts at the Metro stop Gallieni in eastern Paris. Walk underneath the bridge and turn immediately right into the Avenue des Camelia. Turn left into Avenue des Roses and right into Rue du General Leclerc, past suburban flower gardens and allotments …
… before making a right turn into Rue Charles Delescluze. Cross the motorway and turn right into the park Jean Moulin, a typically wonderful piece of 1970s urban planning, a scruffy and featureless expanse of grass that is surrounded on all sides by either high-rise buildings or six-lane freeways.
And what, the local council must have asked, do the residents of this housing estate need more than anything else? Yes: a monumental piece of sculpture that celebrates some event or other that happened many years before most of the local inhabitants were born (or have arrived in France, at any rate).
The park appears to be where the local youth congregates, to play soccer, to smoke funny looking cigarettes or to do whatever it is that local youth in areas like this are doing to keep themselves amused. (Warning: do not do this walk at night. Leave all your valuables behind. Refrain from any ostentatious display of jewelry and expensive watches. And I am saying this only half in jest.)
Leave the park through the exit on Rue Blanche, turn right and then left into Rue Bain. Continue straight into the Sentier des Guilands, a stairway that leads you to the foot of the hill, past one of the quaintest and most “nostalgic” neighbourhoods of Paris.
This is how Paris’s suburban working classes lived before areas like it were “cleaned up” and their inhabitants were moved to the cités.
At the foot of the hill, down Rue de la Fraternité, there is more nostalgia, albeit in a slightly more urban setting: at times, you feel you have travelled back in time to the 1940s.
Cross the Avenue de la Republique into Rue de la Liberté, and after turning left into Rue de l’Egalité, you half expect to run into Madame Desfarges knitting on the Place de la Guillotine around the corner, but instead, what you will see is something quite different: tiles.
When the local council wanted to redecorate this town square on the top of Rue Robespierre, they took the unusual step of asking the local town folks what they wanted, and it turned out that this was what they wanted: tiles – like the ones they have in Barcelona, particularly in Gaudi’s Parc Guell. Barcelona, the tile-covered (but of course!) information board told us, was what inspired this piece of urban regeneration.
The results are surprisingly beautiful in this working class suburb.
Beauty alone, however, it turns out, does little to resolve underlying problems of inner city areas. The beautifully tiled water fountain “has not worked in ages”, as a grumpy old resident complained to us when he saw us taking pictures. While the back of the information board, on closer inspection, had been brutally vandalized.
Sobering, really, if you think about it, putting it into the context of your other observations of the day, and more than enough to chew on on your way home. (Metro Robespierre is a short walk down the street.)
Do tell us if you’ve done any of our walks near Paris or in any working class suburb.
