Prelude
Proximity and ease of access means that Paris is, probably, our most frequent ‘return to’ destination. We now know it well enough that we tend to go for specific events or activities; in this case Paris Photo, one of Europe’s largest and most prestigious photographic fairs. A return to Paris also means a chance for us to enjoy old haunts from previous stays. All this means that this post will cover little that is helpful for the first-timer. Some sections will only build on points covered in the post from our March 2022 stay (A Long Weekend in Paris) and, as we ate in two restaurants we have dined in before, there will be no repetition about those places either. In the end, as urban junkies, we just enjoy being in a lively (and, yes, even in a grey November it is lively) city.
Structure of the Trip
A simple trip to arrange ourselves. Booking the hotel and the train direct. We have not yet found a hotel that best fulfils our particular needs of being central and not too costly, that is easily accessible to good public transport links, especially buses, and has workable access for our mobility constraints. We also struggle now with size of room, the less expensive rooms in Paris hotels tending to be quite small and tight for space around beds and in bathrooms. Add to this a preference for a bathtub and, where possible, a pool and exercise space, there is often a compromise to be made. This time, with some rewards points to help out, we stayed at a place whose pricing was a tad higher than we would normally have considered for this sort of stay.
Getting There – The Train
Eurostar and, save for a further reflection on Mobility Access, there is nothing material to add to the comments made in that earlier post (see Train in this piece).
Mobility Access
On the Eurostar site there is the capacity to change your seat location. Use it wisely. On trains from London try to choose a seat as close to the front of the train as practicable (the front coaches on the outward journey are those with the higher numbers 16 to 18 depending on the train being used). This is because the platform exit at Paris Gare du Nord is at the far end and the trains are long (some nearly 400 metres long) and there is still a walk beyond that within the concourse to reach metro platforms, bus stops or taxi rank. On the return journey the reverse is true. With the exit at London St Pancras also near the platform’s end but, this time, closest to coaches 1 to 4.
We found the portable tripod stool comes in very handy to assist with the queueing bottlenecks, be they at the queues for passport control at Gare du Nord, the queues for security at St Pancras or the taxi queue at both. The taxi queue always seems to be a feature of any Paris arrival but it now seems to be a well-controlled system with a person managing the transfer to the taxis that arrive. Join and be patient is the only sensible advice.
Weather
It is November and Paris sports a uniform greyness: dry, bright, still and without too much of an autumnal bite to the air. Daytime temperatures reached between 9° and 13°C (48-55°F) dropping several degrees at night. As someone remarked it was ideal weather for viewing the artwork in the Grand Palais. Filtered through the stupendous glass roof, held in place by its spider’s web of ironwork, the diffuse light does not pose the issues of harsh light and shade that comes with bright sunshine and it is bright enough to avoid any sense of gloom.
Places Visited
The Grand Palais: Paris Photo
(https://www.parisphoto.com/en-gb.html)
The fair itself, rather than all the surrounding photographic events that populate the city, lasts five days, from a Wednesday to the following Sunday, but with full public access only on the afternoons from Thursday to Sunday. For people who are not familiar with these art fairs, which pop up all over the world, they are essentially a commercial operation where private galleries display works for sale. Paris Photo in 2024 had nearly 250 separate exhibitors. In addition to the galleries (from cities across the globe) who take individual booths and make up the bulk of exhibitors, there are the stalls of the photobook publishers and sections given over to emerging artists and to special displays, including one for the Photobook of the Year awarded by Aperture. This amounts to a lot of photographic images: many are work by contemporary photographers, both established and up-and-coming, some are classic prints from the history of photography stretching back to William Fox Talbot. In addition there are tours, talks and book signings.
This is not the sort of thing that you can whiz round in an hour or two. On the first visit, trying to take in as much art as possible, four hours were spent circling parts of the fair, only covering about two-thirds of the output before visual overload sent us heading for the exit. We are lucky. As a supporter of The Photographers’ Gallery in London (https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk), we are given VIP tickets which allow access to the fair on the Wednesday and each morning thereafter. Also a tour organised by The Photographers’ Gallery allows a more in depth examination of certain booths and, often, introductions from the artists in person to their work. All that meant a day and a half in the Grand Palais and still the surface of the photography on display has only been scratched. Facilities within the hall are available with plentiful toilets and a rather thinner coffee and food offering.
One reason for visiting any exhibition in the Grand Palais is to see the newly-refurbished building in all its nineteenth century grandeur. In effect a single-halled, vast space with glass roof soaring above the stone and ironwork structure, the entrance fee would be worth paying just to wander round and take in the ornateness of the design, with its upper gallery that curls round the walls giving a different perspective on the space.
Mobility Access
As you might expect In a newly-refurbished building, access to and within is compatible with modern needs, with slopes and lifts (elevators) that can be used to circumvent the splendid but long flights of stairs both up to entrance doors and up to the upper gallery within. However, certainly for Paris Photo, a walk round is a lengthy affair. The main interior is 240 metres long and, in weaving in and out of four aisles of gallery booths, you would cover a far greater distance. And that is before you consider visiting the booths and stalls in the upper gallery, a walk around which is going to add another six to eight hundred metres of additional distance to cover. Part of the potential difficulty is that seating is in quite short supply. There are a few bench seats near the main entrance, some concrete ledges that form part of the structure and a limited number of tables near the two main stalls that offer food. The coffee stands on the upper gallery have no more than four seats apiece. There was no sign of wheelchairs or portable stools being available. To all these points need to be added the inevitable queues for access to the venue. Even for VIPs the queue to pass through security stretched for over 100 metres along the pavement outside. The conclusion is that enjoying the fair may not be viable for those who have limitations on their walking and standing capacity.
Public transport access is from Champs-Élysées-Clemenceau Metro stop (on the 1 and 13 lines) and there are buses that run down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées (to the north) and Cours la Reine (to the south). In any of those cases there is a walk of about 250 metres to the main entrance on the east side of the building (facing Avenue Winston Churchill). There are escalators up to ground level from the ticket hall at the metro station.
Visiting Private Art Galleries
This being a visit predicated on an engagement with photography, most of the places visited were the spaces carrying photographic exhibitions. Some of these were commercial galleries whose function is to sell art to wealthy punters. The interesting thing about these commercial galleries is that, despite the sense they are elitist, for someone interested in art, a very pleasant half day (or more) can be spent visiting them for free. They are often open to the public daily, usually with Sunday/Monday closing. They are quite small and so easily walked around. The difficulty is finding out about where they are and what they are showing at any time. There does not seem to be an equivalent to the excellent London Photo Diary that keeps a calendar of current photographic exhibitions in both private and public galleries (https://london-photography-diary.com/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/). The nearest piece that I can find that may be helpful is this, although I am not certain of the year in which the piece was posted, so do cross-check the information given (https://theamericaninparis.com/2024/08/15/seeing-fine-art-photography-in-paris/). In addition we visited two other private galleries which are very much worth a look: Les Filles du Calvaire (https://www.fillesducalvaire.com/en/) and Galerie Poggi (https://galeriepoggi.com/en/).
Mobility Access
It is hard to be definitive about private galleries as they vary in location (they may not be that close to either metro or bus stops) and layout but, as a generality, they are quite small (manageable if you have limited walking and standing capacity) and usually on the ground floor. They may have two levels which means negotiating one flight of stairs as lifts will be a rarity. It is often difficult to plan around such concerns as websites contain next to no information on access issues.
The Other Photographic Biggies
Here I am thinking of the sort of gallery spaces whose primary function is presenting a rolling programme of photographic (and other visual arts) exhibitions. I covered two of these, Institut du Monde Arabe and the Fondation Cartier, in the earlier post on Paris. We visited four different ones on this trip. Three of these galleries have a clear focus on the photographic arts, the Jeu de Paume, LeBal and MEP. They are similar in concept to The Photographers’ Gallery in London. There is a programme of revolving exhibitions (with no permanent displays) coupled with excellent bookshops focused on the photographic arts, a café and programmes of talks and events. The other gallery is within the Centre Pompidou.
As with all Paris galleries and museums, double check your opening times as, apart from the perennial Monday closing, there may be individual quirks of days and times when they are open. The galleries below have opening times that can stretch well into the evening.
Jeu de Paume
Tucked in the north-west corner of the Jardin des Tuileries, the Jeu de Paume was constructed in 1861 as a court for real tennis. Having been through a number of iterations, in 2004 it became a centre for the photographic arts. When we visited, the director emphasised in an introductory talk that in recent times they had been focusing on female artists/photographers and we were here to see a retrospective of work by Tina Barney. There was a second exhibition, which we did not have time to take in. The space does not permit massive multi-room exhibitions so they can be managed in a shorter time.
Mobility Access
Inside all is well with smooth flat floors and lifts (elevators) between levels. There are no seats within the galleries themselves. They have both wheelchairs and portable stools available. There are a few wide spaced steps up to the entrance and, if you do not have a pre-purchased ticket, there is likely to be a bit of a queue to buy one.
The Concorde Metro stop (Lines 1, 8 and 12) is less than 25 metres from the entrance. Unfortunately there are only steps up from the ticket hall at this point and then a further flight of steps to reach the terrace above street level at Place de la Concorde on which the building sits. A step free route is available once out of the Metro but involves a walk of 350 metres. A number of bus routes serve Place de la Concorde but it is such a large space than even alighting at the nearest one would add another 250 metres walking to the given distances. The gallery’s website actually has a very good accessibility page that covers some of this, a page that more places which allow public access should learn from and seek to replicate – https://jeudepaume.org/en/visit/accessibility/.
Le Bal
This independent gallery has been a go-to for the art photography world since its inception in 2006. Tucked up one of those dead-end street/alleyways that are a Paris feature (called an impasse), it is near the busy transport interchange of Place de Clichy. It is a quite unprepossessing building on the right hand side about 30 metres up the Impasse de la Défense from the main road (Avenue de Clichy). They tend to have a single exhibition spread over two relatively small floors, one in the basement but with lift (elevator) access. On this occasion the exhibition was a retrospective of the black and white photography of Yasuhiro Ishimoto, an American-Japanese photographer new to me.
Mobility Access
No issues within the building with flat smooth surfaces and the lift available to get between floors. Depending on the layout of the exhibition there may be benches within the exhibition space. I saw no indication that wheelchairs or portable stools might be available but forgot to ask. Outside the impasse is cobbled brick, so not the easiest for less stable knees or ankles. The gallery is around 200 metres from both the Metro (Lines 2 and 13) and bus stops at Place de Clichy.
MEP or Maison Européenne de la Photographie
(https://www.mep-fr.org/en/homepage/)
A decade older than the other two photography-centred galleries, MEP is in one of those unmistakably Parisian eighteenth-century mansions, fully re-purposed and with a modern extension. It is in the southern fringes of the Marais, less than 100 metres from St Paul Metro stop (Line 1). The gallery covers five levels and the exhibitions are spread over two upper floors, linked by stairs and a lift (elevator). This is the only one whose café is seasonal so any coffee stops will have to take place off-site in the winter months, but there is no shortage of places only a few steps away. Our visit coincided with a themed exhibition, Science Fiction – A Non-History of Plants, juxtaposing classic plant photography, such as Anne Atkins’ cyanotypes and Karl Blossfeldt’s indexical close-ups, with contemporary artists working with visual media, including video and digital imagery as well as photography. We find that these themed exhibitions can often be more stimulating than the more frequent artist-focused ones.
Mobility Access
The lift (elevator) is there, but the gallery spaces have few places to sit and rest. We did not enquire about availability of wheelchairs and portable stools and there is nothing on the website to assist. Access from the street and inside is over flat, smooth surfaces. As with all galleries there can be queues to buy tickets.
Access to street level from St Paul Metro stop has an escalator as well as steps. Bus stops around St Paul cover several routes.
Galerie de Photographie, Centre Pompidou
(https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/collection/photography)
One of Paris’ hidden gems for photographic arts’ exhibitions is this space in the basement of the iconic Centre Pompidou, if for no other reason than, unlike the other galleries in this section, it is free. Like the other galleries mentioned it has a rolling programme. Your only concern then is getting into the building in the first place, as the queues seem only to have become longer over the years. Now access seems to have developed into a system similar to airport security but with separate queues for those in groups, with tickets, without tickets and a priority access. The exhibition we saw was a retrospective of yet another photographer I was unfamiliar with: Barbara Crane. Here her black and white photographs from the 1960s to the 1990s, principally of, or inspired by, the city of Chicago and her time teaching there, mixed straight photography with experimentation.
Mobility Access
Within the Centre flat smooth surfaces, lifts (elevators) and escalators make moving around straightforward. There are no seats inside the photography gallery but it is not an over-large space. The accessibility page of the Centre’s website has useful information including confirmation that wheelchairs are available, if needed. Portable stools (called seat sticks) only seem to be available for the main galleries on levels 4 and 5 (https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/visit/accessibility). That page also has details of nearby Metro and bus stops but I would add a word of caution. The Hotel de Ville metro stop is around 350 metres from the main entrance and I have always tended to avoid Chatelet Metro stop. It is a walk of around 450 to 500 metres from the main entrance and, because it is one of the busiest metro stops in the city with five different lines converging, the web of underground links between the platforms and the surface means you can get the sense you are walking a considerable distance just to get out of the station. The advice is to use Rambuteau (Line 11) if you can or suitable buses or a taxi to get you closer to the building.
Galerie Poggi (see above) is in the row of shops on the opposite side of the wide open space (Place Georges Pompidou) outside the Centre building.
Hotel
Le Roch (https://leroch-hotel.com) is on a side street just off the Avenue de l’Opéra in the heart of the 1er arrondissment. This means right in the centre of things, reasonably close to the Louvre, the Opéra Garnier, the Tuileries Gardens and the up-market shops of the Rue Saint-Honoré. It is officially a five star hotel but this is a boutique place, rather than a grand hotel. Spread across two nineteenth century buildings it is modern of décor and small enough to feel intimate. It has a restaurant, bar, lounge and reception space at ground level and a spa, gym room and pool just big enough for lap swimming (albeit very short laps). This is central Paris so it is not cheap but, as I said, we were taking advantage of some rewards we had with the Mr & Mrs Smith hotel and villa website (https://www.mrandmrssmith.com/luxury-hotels/le-roch-hotel-and-spa). For central Paris the room was comfortably sized with enough room to move around without having to shuffle past one another and a bathroom (with tub) that was of sensible dimensions. We tend to use city centre hotels as sleeping rooms and don’t always need other add-ons because there are so many options outside your door. So only once did we use the bar and restaurant. It was a quiet peaceful space with food in the restaurant well-prepared if a little unexciting. The staff were young and helpful when help was needed, sorting out taxi bookings without fuss.
Mobility Access
The relatively small size of the two buildings meant each one had all its rooms very close to the two lifts (elevators). No steps from the street outside with smooth, flat floors in the public areas.
It is less than 200 metres to reach the nearest bus stops (served by four bus routes) and Pyramides Metro stop (Lines 7 and 14) all on Avenue de l’Opéra. This meant that we found it very convenient for getting around to different parts of the city.
Food and Drink
Breakfasts
I have written in previous posts about our penchant for avoiding expensive hotel buffet breakfasts. To be fair, that at Le Roch is not that expensive, nonetheless we ate elsewhere in the mornings. In this part of Paris there seem to be more options over and above the formule breakfast beloved of the traditional Paris café. Not only a Pret (branches of which seem to be sprouting in many parts of Paris) but a Cojean outlet which had breakfast pots and hot dishes prepared on site for take away or taken at the few inside seats. For a more leisurely breakfast, Le Pain Quotidien was in the nearby Place du Marché Saint-Honoré. This chain has emerged from its financial travails, retaining the same design format (wooden communal table amidst some individual ones) and menu (some sensible healthy options).
Musing on Cafés and Bistros
A corollary to this competition to the Parisian café restaurant is the growth (at least in my wholly subjective view) of the small coffee shop with its few tables and a focus on takeaway and coffee, tea and pastries. Like its equivalent in London, décor usually edges towards the casually distressed. It also means that the choice of café crème or un café has been replaced by the Italo-centric menu of Starbucks and their ilk. The French have even started using ‘flat white’, I suspect much to the disapproval of the Académie Française (https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20220220-french-academy-says-stop-speaking-franglais-s-il-vous-plaît).
The traditional bistro/café is still alive and well however – and as idiosyncratic as ever. We had a lunch in two. Both have all the characteristics: a décor that runs to cream edged with years of wear and tear, light-coloured Formica tables, banquette and solid wooden seats; a menu of comfort food that encompasses soupe a l’oignon, boeuf bourgignon, poisson de la jour (oddly always the same fish) and not a vegetable in sight, except pommes de terre in various forms; a staff that are either noisily entertaining (shouts either to each other or up or down to the kitchen) or exuding that sense that emanates only from Parisian waiters that they would rather be outside sucking in some nicotine; an easily-mopped, mosaic tiled floor and the obligatory zinc-topped bar. The first was Le Rubis (no website but a Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/people/Le-Rubis/100067687753516/), tucked on a side street near the Marché-St. Honoré and not to be confused with a bistro of the same name in the 2eme arrondissment which looks to be a place of rather more elegance. Le Rubis has been around as a café since the 1900s, billed in a guidebook as a ‘neighbourhood café’ and it was just that. It was mercifully quiet on a weekday afternoon with a late lunch, ordered almost as we step through the door because ‘la cuisine ferme dans dix minutes’ (at around 14.30), followed by peaceful expressos that joined us as we sat and read or wrote for an hour or so. Le Bougainville (https://bougainville-restaurant.fr) was anything but quiet but rather a riot of elbow-to-elbow diners at the height of lunch time. For a small group of supporters from The Photographers’ Gallery it was an enjoyable place to take a break from the strolling from gallery to gallery. A bonus is that the bistro is in another species of gallery; the beautiful nineteenth century Galerie Vivienne and its cross-street galleries which are one of the passages couverts (https://www.visitparisregion.com/en/inspiration/top-experiences/covered-passages-paris), most of which have been restored and brim with fascinating shops and eating places.
Mobility Access
Both these places are at street level, and pretty small. Floors there are flat, maybe with the occasional step up or down for a level change or to step into the toilet (often a place so small that it would barely rate being called a cupboard). And it is the cramped nature of the interior that may be the most difficult aspect of these places as you try manoeuvring into seats at tables during the the busy times. Access to Le Rubis by public transport is straightforward, with Tuileries metro stop (1 line) only 250 metres away and the buses and metro (Pyramides – Lines 7 and 14) on Avenue de l’Opéra a walk of 300 to 400 metres. Le Bougainville is a little further from the metro with Bourse metro (Line 3) 350 metres to the north and Palais Royal- Musée du Louvre (Lines 1 and 7) around 650 metres south, although with the last of these it can be an excuse to walk through the glorious garden and arcades of Palais Royal (with plenty of benches for rests). However the 29 bus drops you within 100 metres of the bistro.
Restaurants
Given we ate at two places that are regular haunts mentioned in the previous post (A Long Weekend in Paris), there was only one evening meal at a place new to us. Searching out interesting vegetarian food in Paris has become somewhat easier in recent times and our online searching brought us to Le Grenier de Notre Dame on the Left Bank in rue de la Bûcherie, a narrow street just one road back from the quai opposite the cathedral. No website or Facebook page, so have a look at menus on TheFork website (https://www.thefork.co.uk/restaurant/le-grenier-de-notre-dame-r824800#geo_dmn_redirect=20210629AT100). It is an unpretentious, busy and snug place, with an interesting vegetarian selection. You will need to book.
Mobility Access
Access is straight from the street with no steps but there is only a small ground level space (with, from recollection, only three or four tables), the bulk of the seating being upstairs.
The nearest Metro stops are at Saint-Michel Notre-Dame (Line 4) at 400 metres distant and Cluny La Sorbonne and Maubert Mutualité (both line 10) about 300 metres away. There is a plethora of bus options around Place Saint-Michel, 400 metres west along the quai.
Getting Around
Get the bus! You will see so much more than if you go on the Metro. It may take longer but, with a judicious use of the ‘Directions’ option on Google Maps, you will be able to get to most places with a careful change of buses. Just watch out for the distance between stops at changeovers. In the end you probably walk a good bit less than if you use the Metro as you can never be certain how far it is to walk to get to and from platforms or to make line changes and there are nearly always sets of steps involved in those transitions.
We go to Paris enough to have warranted buying a Navigo pass. Like in so many modern cities with subway networks, getting a pay-as-you-go card which you can reload easily at the multi-lingual machines in most Metro station ticket halls just makes life so much easier. The where-to-buy information is easy to find on the internet. I would start with the Paris transport corporation (RATP) website (https://www.ratp.fr/en) or this section of The Man in Seat 61’s website (https://www.seat61.com/changing-stations-in-paris.htm#:~:text=You%20first%20need%20to%20acquire,at%20least%20one%20t%2B%20ticket.). For iPhone users it is now possible to use your device to access and pay for rides (https://www.bonjour-ratp.fr/en/actualites/articles/nouveau-votre-passe-navigo-est-dans-votre-iphone/).
