That’s another paradox of the city. If you lose autonomy and accept the rather savage, draconian psychology of the city, and you abandon your autonomy, then you can’t die. You don’t really exist — you exist as the Man of the Crowd. You don’t exist as Jo anymore, in a way. The conception of the flâneur and the idea of viewing the city as something to engage with in a ludic manner — in a kind of disruptive manner — is a privilege, really. I mean, it’s not open to most people for obvious economic reasons. They just can’t indulge in it. What I’m always trying to encourage people to do is to nonetheless make the steps necessary to see what the city is like when you don’t regard it in that utilitarian, anonymous, Man in the Crowd way. You step aside from it. The original flâneurs who come out of the original bohemian conception in Paris were young people; they were just hippies, basically. They were just young people getting stoned and hanging out. We can’t all do that, clearly. Or not as much as we’d like to.
Feeling in Neon
Cal Revely-Calder
London’s St Pancras station is a Victorian cathedral of redbrick and iron. For a spell in the mid-twentieth century, it decayed and was nearly demolished — in 1949, the poet John Betjeman feared that it was “too beautiful and too romantic to survive” — but eventually, its fortunes turned. After an £800 million investment, it was reborn as the British terminal of the Eurostar. Paris is 306 miles down the line. Here in this colossal vaulted space, two countries are meeting and parting ways.
The station itself forms the context to Tracey Emin’s latest installation, while her text is a single sentence: “I want my time with you”. These eighteen letters are written in twenty feet of pink neon, one of Emin’s staple materials; the handwriting is her own too, her characteristic swift strokes1. I want my time with you hangs from the wires above the Grand Terrace, and it’s visible from most of the station’s first floor, but since it’s square-on to the Eurostar platforms, it directly addresses the travellers either leaving for Europe or returning home. Hanging in the concourse where people reunite after months apart, Emin’s words make their intimate feelings a public thing.
In this little romance, who’s the “I”, who’s the “you”? They might be individual lovers, anonymised in grammar; or, poised where they are, they could be abstractions, political entities. “I”, facing down the line to France, might be the 48% of British voters who didn’t want to sunder themselves from Europe, and “you” might be the continent they’re being forced to quit. Which reading do you want to be true? For most of us, it could equally be either — the personal or the political — because I want my time with you is a piece of speech, and the meanings of speech start to messily proliferate when feelings are involved. These words are the figure, as Roland Barthes put it, of “the lover at work”. The neon gives tangible form to their emotion, and amplifies it with light.
Emin has been making neon works since the early Nineties, and most of them end in one of two personal pronouns, either “me” or “you”. Usually her words are unadorned by anything except an emphatic stroke; she puts People like you need to fuck people like me (2007) in a doe-eyed loop, and gives I can’t believe how much you loved me (2010) a double underscore. Each light-tube shows what Roger Fry saw in every calligraphic mark: “the record of a gesture”. And Emin adores neon’s sensual edge, calling it “sexy”, “spangly”, “pulsating”, “out there”, “vibrant”. In her strokes, you see the trace of her body itself.
I want my time with you is nakedly honest. That’s all the more obvious when you compare it to the permanent piece on the Grand Terrace beneath: Paul Day’s The Meeting Place, a large bronze statue of two lovers united again.
Train stations may be sanctuaries of romance, but every romance feels, to those who share it, like a unique and private dream; Day’s sculpture is everyone’s and no one’s, a piece of postcard kitsch. Emin’s sentence, by contrast, is an exposure of something uncertain and raw. She says she imagines a question mark at the end of her sentence: “I want my time with you?”
The week I went up to St Pancras, London had been under thick cloud all week, and we hadn’t seen the sun for days. I arrived in the late afternoon; there was little light coming through the glass roof, and I want my time with you was already beginning to glow. By 8 o’clock night had fallen, and Emin’s sentence was burning in the air. Its brightness suddenly gave it thrust, as if the words were pushing away from the brickwork behind. In Flickering Light: A History of Neon, Christoph Ribbat tells a story from 2010, about Emin going back to Margate to open the Turner Contemporary gallery:
She appeared in front of the Margate Pier and Harbour Company Building, now adorned with a pink-coloured neon installation featuring Emin’s characteristic handwriting and the words “I’ve never stopped loving you”. […] Taking hold of the microphone to give a speech on that spring day, with the audience eager before her and her glowing pink declaration of love to crisis-ridden Margate overhead, Tracey Emin burst into tears.
You can picture I want my time with you the same way: the handwritten trace of a woman, leaning forward, imploring a crowd, or a country, or a single person who looks set to leave. She could write a “declaration of love” in ink or paint; anyone could. But romance is a thing with aura, and it needs a certain glow.
1 (In the event, due to intractable problems with size and weight, the work had to be secretly made with LEDs. These were designed to be indistinguishable from neon and to replicate its effects. But the secret shouldn't matter; it isn't what you see.)
Terminus Nord
Adam Roberts
It’s 6.45 in the morning and I have positioned myself in a window seat in the Terminus Nord brasserie opposite the Gare du Nord. Soon the August sun will rise towards its apex and crush Paris again, but at this hour the air is cooler, fresher and easier to breathe, and the light strikes familiar buildings from unfamiliar angles. The Gare du Nord glows golden, like a temple to travelling, but today I have no destination adrenaline to jolt me from my fuzzy early morning mindset.
Instead I’m hoping that the “express” breakfast will do the job. An orange juice in a wine glass, a cold croissant sitting on a micro serviette and an insipid coffee, a triptych served up in hundreds of other cafés around Paris. Boxes of oysters arrive for the seafood display — surely not by train — and a clock on the wall is frozen in the wrong time. Outside, the station is waking up. Taxis and hire cars are dropping off heavy eyed passengers, and a street cleaning vehicle, in bright institutional green, sweeps noisily past.
Terminus Nord has seen better days, but I’m not sure when these were. The Art Deco script on the façade insists it began life in 1925, but a painting on the wall inside shows the same place with the same name in 1889. A game of mirrors gamely tries to amplify its importance, but it is much smaller inside than I’d always assumed it to be. There is a hotel above here too, currently being transformed into what is bizarrely described on the promotional website as an “urban refuge… as colourful as an African bazaar”.
If, like Georges Perec at the Place Saint-Sulpice, I stay in this seat all day, I might see all of Paris, possibly the whole world even. It is part of the reason I’m here. Paris should be explored in all its corners, but the ordinary should also be experienced at extraordinary times, and above all with no clear reason in mind. In his “Theory of the Dérive”, the Situationist Guy Debord suggested an extreme case of a city exploring psychogeographical drift could be “a static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station”. By not moving and simply observing I might capture an essence of Paris across endless coffee cups, beer glasses and ham sandwiches.
Despite innumerable trips through the Gare du Nord, between England, where I was born and grew up, and Paris, my home today, I have never really observed the station’s façade before. A statue of Paris stands proudly in the centre, a Napoleonic eagle at her feet. To her left, lower down, is London, an impatient hand on hip, and on her right is Brussels. A little further away are
the more distant cities — Warsaw and Vienna — impossible to reach in a single train journey today. Lower down are the more mundane destinations — Cambrai, Beauvais, Valenciennes — but all still reminders that any place served by a train station contains the poetry of possibilities.
This is the second Gare du Nord. The first opened in 1846, but by 1855 was already embarrassingly too small to welcome Queen Victoria’s train during her state visit, and the British queen, possibly not amused, was instead diverted to the neighbouring Gare de l’Est. The humiliated Compagnie du Nord immediately started planning for a new station, and dismantled the original building brick by brick, sending it up the line to Lille where it still acts as one of the city’s train stations.
Today’s Gare du Nord opened in 1864 and was designed by the architect Jacques-Ignace Hittorff, who had earlier been responsible for the remodeling of the Place de la Concorde and the nascent urbanisation of the Champs-Elysées. Hittorff was born in Cologne in 1792, two years before the city was invaded and occupied by French forces. Despite moving to Paris in 1810 and finally gaining French nationality in 1842, Hittorff was still widely and disparagingly known as “the Prussian” when the train station was built. Is it for this reason that his masterpiece is one of the great hidden buildings of Paris? The Gare du Nord was erected during the massive restructuring of the city under Napoleon III and the Baron Haussmann, but it is one of the rare landmark constructions of this period not to be afforded an approaching boulevard with a classic Haussmannian vista. A persistent Paris rumour has it that Haussmann denied Hittorff this privilege after suspecting him of being too friendly with his wife, but financial disputes with the Rothschild family are a more likely explanation.
Six years after it opened, the new station had its first history marking moment. Hittorff had died in 1867, and Napoleon III and Haussmann had been removed from their positions of power. France was now at war — ironically with Prussia — and Paris was menaced with invasion. On 5 September 1870, the people of the city massed at the Gare du Nord, eagerly awaiting the arrival of an unlikely saviour on the evening train from Brussels; the writer Victor Hugo, returning from a near twenty-year exile. According to a reporter from the Le Rappel newspaper who witnessed the event, Hugo initially wanted to jump straight into a carriage, but the crowd would not let him leave without a few words of morale-boosting Hugolean bombast. He stood at the window of a corner café opposite the station — possibly in exactly my position this morning — and proceeded to make one of his most famous declarations. “Saving Paris means more than saving France, it means saving the world,” he declared, imploring the Parisians to defend this “centre of humanity… the sacred city”. Hugo didn’t save Paris from invasion.
Already tired of my static position I decide to leave the Terminus Nord and immediately note the number of establishments within a few metres that have names connected to places reached from the Gare du Nord: Aux Villes du Nord, the Hotel des Belges, La Ville d’Aulnay, La Ville d’Arras. Glimpses of linked destinations such as these are less to provide a quick pre-trip taster and more a trace of a previous time when economic exiles from the regions rarely moved far from the place they first arrived and the place that could rapidly get them back home again. The station therefore became a buffer zone, a tiny annex of a beloved distant territory providing protection against the unwelcoming city that began a street or so further away. Today, exiles can still stand in the station, and — as the poet John Betjeman wrote:
…visualize, far down the shining lines,
Your parents’ homestead set in murmuring pines.
Train stations are integral functional parts of a city but also an alien elsewhere. The Gare du Nord is Europe’s busiest railway station, but a lot of this action is taking place underground. From here I could head down to the three rapid suburban lines that link the city to big centres of population to the north and east. This other world sits underneath the mainline tracks, and is peopled by the inhabitants of these suburbs. The lines spill out into a windowless shopping centre, designed as a place to pass through, but today a neutral territory where groups gather to hang out. It is not their hometown but not quite Paris either, a city they rarely even see. There have been occasional battles when groups from rival gangs clash, but there is nothing to hold on to or possess in this intangible and characterless environment.
“If you live next to a train station it completely changes your life,” wrote the author Patrick Modiano. “You have the impression of passing through. Nothing is ever permanent.” I see little evidence of people living opposite the Gare du Nord today, but they must do I suppose. It is the ubiquitous train station fabric that is most obvious, the pure transience of places that simply underline the station’s role as a location of anonymity and constant movement. There are temporary employment and car rental agencies, fast food outlets and sex shops, their €1 burgers and “cabines automatiques” both offering quick, cheap satisfaction.
I decide to make a quick tour of the station perimeter, to see how far this strange atmosphere permeates. Heading northwards on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, I remember that another urban oddity is situated here. Look closely at number 172 and you will be observing not the banal Parisian building it appears to be, but rather a giant hollow air vent. It is a construction that was made necessary by the extension of the suburban RER E line into the city, and there is another similar building one hundred or so metres further away on the Rue Lafayette that Umberto Eco compared to a “mouth of hell” in Foucault’s Pendulum. A train station has a visible impact on a city, but much is also going on unseen, in flues, cables, pipes and hidden service tunnels.
How far do you need to walk away from a train station until it is forgotten or unimagined? On the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis the Gare du Nord is no longer in sight, although those living on the odd side of the street have sweeping views across the tracks from their rear windows. This is not railway territory but instead one of the city’s most vibrant immigrant communities, a neighbourhood of Tamils who settled here after fleeing the civil wars in Sri Lanka in the 1980s and 1990s. The fragrant shops and restaurants have given the area the name of Little Jaffna, but the community has not chosen the vicinity of the Gare du Nord to maintain links with homeland and family. Instead travel agents advertise flights to Colombo and Madras on printed A4 sheets in the window, but would any community deliberately choose to live next to an airport?
The top of the street is dissected by the Boulevard de la Chapelle and the iron baulk of the overhead Métro line. The city’s Métro system is situated almost entirely underground, except where it crosses railway lines. Although the constructors tunnelled under the Seine, the channels of railway track were considered to be an even tougher challenge, or perhaps scenery that would not be spoiled by conspicuous bridges. These outside stretches though are most people’s favourite parts of the journey, and not just because their smartphones flick back to full 4G reception.
I cross the long bridge over the two dozen or so tracks of the Gare du Nord by foot. Emile Zola described a similar view at the Gare Saint-Lazare as a “vaste champ”, and the huge expanse — so rare in Paris — is almost pastoral in its scale and perspective. It is a visual treat, but this place is really about the sounds and odours. The tracks sing, the trains clack rhythmically in and out of the station, a bell rings somewhere far in the distance and a robotic voice lists destinations like a freeform poem. Around this on different waves are permanent notes of oil and sparked steel. A line from Apollinaire’s poem “La Victoire” pops into my mind: “Be afraid that someday a train will no longer thrill you.”
The other side of this bridge is Zola territory, the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood of L’Assammoir. Set at the time of the first Gare du Nord, the station was not then significant enough to merit a mention in the book, but Zola himself had a fleeting, unwanted brush with the Gare du Nord later in life. On 18 July 1898, at the height of the Dreyfus affair and facing a year in jail, Zola escaped Paris in the London
train, chugging past the Goutte d’Or completely alone and “with only a nightshirt wrapped in a newspaper” as luggage.
In L’Assammoir, Coupeau, the husband of the principal character Gervaise, is employed as a roofer at the Lariboisière hospital that was then being built. Walking down the Rue de Maubeuge that dissects Lariboisière and the Gare du Nord, the hospital can only be guessed at behind a high, grimy wall. A recurring Paris question pops into my mind: why are so many hospitals in the city situated next to train stations? This should perhaps not be a surprise. Both have arrivals and departures, waiting rooms, long anonymous corridors and staff in uniforms, and both offer you the freedom to wander aimlessly (and the Lariboisière hospital is an attractive place for a stroll). Nobody questions why you are in a hospital or a train station. After all, everyone must surely have a reason to be there.
The poet and author Max Jacob, who was treated in this hospital after a road accident, also noted such links. “The hospital is a station” he wrote, with “travellers to the country of shadows! Travellers towards different health!” Above all, in what he labelled the “mausoleum of the living”, “be wary of the departures from which we never come back.”
We'll Never Have Paris Page 27
