Every design for Antony

Antony is known as the crossroads of the southern suburbs: the great north–south road has run through here for two thousand years, and today the RER B, Orly airport and the Massy hub keep the town moving. It is a town of schools and hospitals too, home to one of the largest private educational institutions in France.

The Arboretum municipal Roger de Vilmorin is a good place to start reading its past. The old village grew on the green marls of the Bièvre valley, and in the gypsum beneath it the oldest creature ever found in Antony turned up: Anoplotherium commune, a long-tailed herbivore the size of a donkey, studied by Georges Cuvier. Little built up until the early twentieth century, the town grew fast between the wars under its senator-mayor Auguste Mounié, then again in the early sixties to house people repatriated from Algeria. The Château Sarran and the Château de Vilmorin stand from older times, the Monument au Général Leclerc from a more recent one, and the Bièvre still runs in the open through Heller Park before slipping underground.

For anyone who grew up here, the map holds the river path, the trains to Paris and the streets of the old village.