Ten suggestions for the Journées du Patrimoine

In France, the third weekend in September is synonymous with the Journées du Patrimoine (heritage days), which offer free access to culturally or historically significant buildings and sites that are generally off limits or off the radar.

Typically this can mean long queues outside the various hôtels particuliers that are used today as ministerial offices, but you needn't waste your weekend this way. Instead, you can whizz between the following queue-free locations!

What can you do for €60 in Paris?

I don’t normally work with companies promoting services on this blog, but I recently received a challenge that I thought would be genuinely interesting in connection to a service that seemed particularly useful to travellers. The challenge came from WeSwap*, who asked how I would spend £50 in one day in Paris. Obviously it's pretty easy to spend that amount of money very quickly in the French capital, but the challenge was rather to see just how much I could do with that sum.

Grand Train, a good idea on the wrong track

Running throughout the summer until October, Grand Train is a large-scale installation is a disused SNCF facility in the north of Paris. If the scale of the site and the activities on offer are impressive, the diversity of the visitors is a little less wide.

Open for 12 hours a day from Wednesday to Sunday, Grand Train mixes outdoor zones on disused rail tracks, fast food and a kind of impromptu railway museum. In a city lacking space it offers a generous pocket of air, even if the weather has not been particularly kind since it opened at the end of April.

The sporting star who fell to earth

The Cimetière Sud de Saint-Mandé is notable for several oddities. Firstly, although it takes the name of a Paris suburb and is still managed by that town, it is today situated within Paris. Second curiosity, the barrier that separates the cemetery from Saint Mandé is the thunderous périphérique motorway, making it undoubtedly the noisiest graveyard in Paris.
 
It is also possibly the city’s least interesting cemetery, short of charm and celebrities (a sign at the entrance highlights a handful of ex-mayors and the wife of the founder of the Grevin waxworks museum). In one corner though, framed by a solid block of thriving horse chestnut trees, stands perhaps the cemetery’s single striking monument – the half-naked statue of a strong and healthy looking young man.

The allée Guy Debord: real or imaginary?

On the very edge of Paris where the city segues into Aubervilliers, Google Maps tells us that there is an allée Guy Debord. In the location itself – a recent footpath running between an isolated shopping mall and an arm of the canal Saint Denis – nothing is written and no buildings use the address. If a name exists only on a map, does it really exist at all? It’s a situation that the theorist, writer, filmmaker might well have appreciated.