Sunday's Best

Sundays in Paris are calm year round, but in August some parts of the city may as well be packed away in a cupboard and locked up until September. Walking through some of these hushed streets recently I stumbled into the Rue Daguerre and found a surreal site. In the centre of the city, here was a road that looked like a Wild West frontier town just before the bad guy rides in. Everything was locked up, no cars were moving and there was hardly a soul on the street. All that was missing was a creaking door, a three-legged dog and some rolling tumbleweed.

It was certainly strange to find such a site, but at least it gave me the opportunity to investigate the street in detail without the fear of being run over. The reason for the tranquillity is that this area forms one of the zones that the city hands over to pedestrians on Sundays and Bank Holidays. However, whilst the Canal Saint Martin or the Rue des Martyrs remains lively and busy throughout the year, here the shops and bars were closed, and all the local residents were seemingly far away from the city. It seems somewhat pointless to maintain this blockade of through traffic in August, but even silenced this way the street is worthy of a visit in its torpid state, and this for one reason; colour.

Here is a selection of some of the street facades, many of which are rendered more mysterious and enigmatic in their sleepy, Sunday state!

It is quite unusual to find such a wide selection of colours in what is mostly a homogeneous and restrained city, but it is also extraordinary to find this exuberance in such a quiet district. Look down the equally subdued side streets though and you will catch glimpses of the Montparnasse cemetery. The tombs resting silently there, Gainsbourg and Baudelaire, Man Ray and Maupassant, also serve as a reminder that this part of the city was once a lively, artistic haunt.