I'm afraid that once again the blog took a bit of a backseat in 2017, with less than a dozen posts across the year. Despite the blog format struggling against Facebook or even the longer tweet format and tweet threads, I was nevertheless pleased to see that my post on the La Banane from June is now the 7th most read ever on Invisible Paris!
Not so long ago I stumbled on an official list of all the streets in Paris. Looking through the list of over 6,000 roads in the city, I noticed that the first on the list - Chemin de l'Abbaye - and the last - Boulevard de la Zone - are at the outer limits of Paris, and at opposite sides of the city. Would it be possible then to walk through the alphabet, from one side of the city to the other?
After a long but enjoyable process, my Paris Cityscopes guide finally went on sale in August. I am not very strong on self-promotion, but I am very happy with the result of the book, and now hope as many people as possible will (want to) read it! Find out here how you can get hold of a copy.
This summer saw not only the publication of my Paris Cityscopes guide, but also the Cityscopes guide for Berlin, written by Joseph Pearson, an author and academic based in the German capital and editor of influential local blog ‘The Needle’. To mark this double publication, Joseph and I exchanged questions and answers on our respective cities. How Berlin-like is Paris and how Paris-like is Berlin? Find out on our respective blogs!
I have written a review of the republication of 'Nairn's Paris', a guide written in 1968 by seminal architectural critic Ian Nairn, that you can find in this month's edition of the Literary Review magazine.
If you are not familiar with the idiosyncratic work of Ian Nairn, I recommend you read this article published 30 years after his early death, which also includes clips of his equally quirky television programmes.
When we think of Paris, we don't generally imagine modern, functional structures in concrete, but a recent map published by Blue Crow Media aims to show how rich the city actually is in imaginative and unusual 'brutalist' buildings. More than that, Paris can also legitimately declare itself to be the spiritual home of concrete!
In an almost perfectly square kilometre between Belleville and the Père Lachaise cemetery, a rather strange anomaly is written large on Google Maps - La Banane. What does this name actually represent, and what is the reality of this little visited part of the city?
On Invisible Paris, we've been here before. On July 4th 1905 - at the height of the public fascination with the Apaches sub-culture - a policeman on his first patrol was shot dead in this district. The incident was made more infamous with the publication of a book shortly afterwards, but at no moment was the name 'Banane' ever used.
As part of the worldwide Obscura Day events on Saturday May 6 I will be hosting a tour of the ghostly Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale in the Bois de Vincennes.
Tracking down a war memorial last seen in the Père Lachaise cemetery nearly 100 years ago seemed like a tough task, particularly when the challenge came from a Paris graveyard art expert who did not recall ever having seen such a thing before. But despite the photographic evidence to the contrary, what if the memorial had simply never actually existed?
Nearly a year ago I published a post on this blog about a mysterious address on the edge of Paris. Although the allée Guy Debord was mentioned on maps, there seemed to be no evidence of it in the location itself. So did it really exist? The question was all the more interesting given the identity of the person concerned and the post-modern landscape in which the street was supposedly located.
Although it is difficult to plot the centre of a city coiled into 20 different arrondissements, geographically the spot wouldn’t be too far away from the Place du Chatêlet. Despite this centrality, the square and its surrounding streets wear an air of melancholic emptiness, as if imprisoned by their stifling past.
