Marseille - shape shifting city
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Marseille, a city for the lone flaneur, curiosity at every quirky corner, the disarray cheek-by-jowl with the finessed. The humour tickling the pride. Boats in the harbour, Africans in the markets, Europeans in the French cafes with napkins, darker men in the Algerian cafes without. Murmurations of starlings foretelling a shape shifting city, one that revels in disordering order.
Marseille, a busy city of centres, noisy with incident and chatter, all nature of peoples intermingling in the streets, selling and buying from stalls that arrive and disappear in a morning, spaces shifting their use, young groups coming together to entertain under the mirrored shelter that yesterday was a flower market, a city living on activity rather than hope. |
Away from the heart quiet avenues and squares settle between clutches of loud excited activity on the radiating corridors, disrupted grid streets form vaguely planned quarters, swathes of urban suburban wrap pocket squares with their own caféd edges, while closer to the sea long flights of steps link neighbourhoods, their churches, the Mediterranean coastline. Everywhere the noises are real, of real play, real peacefulness and real argument, the aroma of vaguely controlled rubbish an appropriate reflection of living, time worn detritus stacked in corners awaiting a purpose, parking two deep and jumbled, asphalt and stone streetscape undesigned and unmaintained, graffiti on walls adding local colour, all colliding in a manner that is a free spirited, broadly accepted, tangle of tolerance.
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While we all admire Le Corbusier, we can be glad that the dark impersonal corridors of the over-restrained Unité d'Habitation didn’t catch-on in Marseille. Where it sought to, the flush of second-rate housing estates that followed the ground-level-for-all-and-no-one approach are now being recovered from their dangerous days. In so doing maybe they will engender a new social ownership that Corbusier believed in but rarely achieved. If they would bend to allow the personal to occupy the impersonal, they would better accommodate the richness of Marseille.
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Marseilles seeks to accommodate its tourists too. While in the city centre they are immersed and invisible in the multi-culturalism, it is on the extremities and occasionally at junctions that the troupes are found, where the coaches and the cruisers pull up and disgorge, where the city dots its few sights.
Keeping the free-standing sea-edge cathedral company from a safe but not sufficiently separate distance is the beginning of an expensive ill-planned look-at-me-I’m-modern start of a museum quarter, repopulating an abandoned dockside with swanky cultural warehouses, a bereft Lego/Expo planning arrangement linked by wide-open spaces and token bridges for no apparent reason except to tenuously connect to the city across the segregating highway. Is it that those who plan these things did not examine their own city for the interweaving of old and new, or could they not countenance more tourists in the urban heart, instead choosing to confine them to the dock where their boats come in?
At the sights the sound is not local and measured, but of the invasive green parrots that dash through the town and live elsewhere. The litter is not natural and the urban realm too designed, out of keeping with the historic places being kept. As often begets such places, there’s a well-meaning superficiality to it all. It is with some relief that Marseille doesn’t have so many examples.
Keeping the free-standing sea-edge cathedral company from a safe but not sufficiently separate distance is the beginning of an expensive ill-planned look-at-me-I’m-modern start of a museum quarter, repopulating an abandoned dockside with swanky cultural warehouses, a bereft Lego/Expo planning arrangement linked by wide-open spaces and token bridges for no apparent reason except to tenuously connect to the city across the segregating highway. Is it that those who plan these things did not examine their own city for the interweaving of old and new, or could they not countenance more tourists in the urban heart, instead choosing to confine them to the dock where their boats come in?
At the sights the sound is not local and measured, but of the invasive green parrots that dash through the town and live elsewhere. The litter is not natural and the urban realm too designed, out of keeping with the historic places being kept. As often begets such places, there’s a well-meaning superficiality to it all. It is with some relief that Marseille doesn’t have so many examples.
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Back in the heart and in the dark of Saturday evening, up and down through the winding streets of Le Panier locals of a certain age come together at Roll’Studio, around the loosely constructed plywood bar in the corridor between the street and the stone basement arch in which they gather to listen to their colleagues playing jazz, joking freely in between the deftly performed tunes as they seem to have done for many years and will do for many more, sharing pizzas after the set, looking forward to the Opera tomorrow.
Tomorrow is a Sunday morning and on a Sunday morning in Marseille there are the runners, endless Sunday runners, filling the pavements with Lycra and working off the easily available excesses of the local lifestyle of the night before. The urban beaches sport volleyball, chasing dogs and toe-dipping temerity, all overseen by the only slightly older generation of pram pushers and the far older seniors gathered on the esplanade to watch it all through the morning, awaiting a long slow lunch in the weak warm sun.
Marseille is a self-assured city, multi-cultural, accommodating, graffitied, elegant, allowing and accepting, a juxtaposition of people and buildings and characters. The French at their most Mediterranean, hints of Africa, an easy smile and a carefree shrug. All too soon the return to the airport, ripped off for only a nominal amount by a taxi driver with a smile, a wave and ample best wishes. What’s not to like.
Tomorrow is a Sunday morning and on a Sunday morning in Marseille there are the runners, endless Sunday runners, filling the pavements with Lycra and working off the easily available excesses of the local lifestyle of the night before. The urban beaches sport volleyball, chasing dogs and toe-dipping temerity, all overseen by the only slightly older generation of pram pushers and the far older seniors gathered on the esplanade to watch it all through the morning, awaiting a long slow lunch in the weak warm sun.
Marseille is a self-assured city, multi-cultural, accommodating, graffitied, elegant, allowing and accepting, a juxtaposition of people and buildings and characters. The French at their most Mediterranean, hints of Africa, an easy smile and a carefree shrug. All too soon the return to the airport, ripped off for only a nominal amount by a taxi driver with a smile, a wave and ample best wishes. What’s not to like.
January 2025
