Paris pours style on its canals

The Canal Saint-Martin is a time machine and not just because it ends in Stalingrad.

The Canal Saint-Martin is a time machine and not just because it ends in Stalingrad.

If you walk the three miles of the canal (from the Place de la République to the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad), you abandon the wealthy, homogenised, well-scrubbed grandeur of 21st-century Paris. You infiltrate a meaner, tougher, more picturesque, almost vanished city: the Paris of black-and-white movies and the Inspector Maigret novels.

Bicycles bump along cobbled quays; workmen in bright blue overalls gesticulate outside small bars; racks full of brown and black jackets are heaped furtively into yellow vans; a saxophone plays from an upstairs window; children sit on the canal bank and swap cards. (They are, admittedly, Pokémon cards, not collections of pre-war cyclists or footballers in Brylcream and thick jumpers.) At the end of this month, the Paris city council will consider an ambitious £60m plan to revive the city's neglected canal system.

The investment is, in some respects, long overdue. A canal basin collapsed near Stalingrad last year, with almost disastrous results. On the other hand, some of the people who already use and appreciate the canals fear the worst: a dagger of gentrification plunged into the heart of one of the last remaining, pleasant, working-class areas of the French capital. The Paris waterways were built, by decree of Napoleon Bonaparte, in the early 1800s to bring fresh water into the city and to divert barges from the overcrowded Seine. Two hundred years later, another small, pugnacious, controversial Corsican, Jean Tiberi, the mayor of Paris, wants to use them to pump fresh life into the capital's more rundown quarters and divert the flow of visitors from the standard tourist sights.

"We have to make the landscape around the canals more attractive for leisure activities and walks," Mr Tiberi said last week.

What this means is renovating, and in some places rebuilding, the canal banks; banning cars from the quays on Sundays; turning disused warehouses into cafés and restaurants; and fitting rainbow-coloured illuminations to the long tunnel section of the canal to allow tourists to sail up and down in electrically powered boats.

Some of these ideas make sense. The canals - the Canal de L'Ourcq and the Canal St-Denis, as well as the Canal Saint-Martin, perhaps six miles in all, linking the Seine to the Seine, through northern Paris - are dangerously rundown. They almost disappeared in the 1960s. There was a plan to turn them into a motorway, which was defeated by public outcry and lack of cash.

In the 1980s, some money was spent on renovation, allowing barges to bring bulk building materials into the centre of the capital once again, and permitting slow boat trips between the Seine and the huge, oblong, urban lake, the Bassin de la Villette, just north of Stalingrad in the 19th arrondissement.

When it opened in 1808, the Bassin was briefly one of the most fashionable places in Paris, a rival to the Venice Lido: a place for strolling, swimming and boating in summer and skating in winter. Its popularity declined after the city's main slaughterhouses congregated on its banks in the late 19th century. Mr Tiberi now hopes that it can reclaim some of its former grandeur.

The people who live beside the canal have mixed feelings about the mayor's plans. Strolling up the Saint-Martin canal this week, I discovered Jean-Louis Roubier, 74, fishing in a scruffy stretch, just south of Stalingrad, which is due for "upgrading" with restaurants and cafés and a new marina. A tangle of busy roads and an open-air metro line passed just above his head but he was as absorbed by the behaviour of his line and float as if he were in the deepest countryside.

Are there fish in the Paris canals? "Like that," he said, spreading his arms in the classic fisherman's gesture. "Pike, perch, bream, all kinds. But none today."

Did he welcome the plan to revitalise the canals? He growled. "First they want to turn them into motorways. Then they ignore them so they fall apart.

"Then they decide they should become a luxury, something for tourists.

"Personally, I would be happy if they spent just a little money maintaining them as they should. I come here every day. The canal is the only place left where you can be quiet. What do we want with cafés and restaurants? Haven't they got those on the Champs Elysées?"