Every design for Pantin

Have you ever followed the Canal de l'Ourcq out of Paris on foot? A few minutes past the city's edge you are in Pantin, where the water cuts straight through the town and the old port site has been reworked into open public spaces lined with long strips of grass.

Pantin sits hard against the Boulevard Périphérique in the north-eastern suburbs, on a plain crossed by the N2 and N3 and the Paris–Strasbourg railway. By the nineteenth century the canal and the tracks had split it into the 'Village' and the Quatre-Chemins, and its quarters still carry those names, along with Les Courtillières and Petit Pantin. In 2023 it even renamed itself Pantine for a while, a symbolic gesture for women's rights.

Between the canal, the Fort de Romainville and the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie just over the border, Pantin is a map you can read in a single walk, and one well worth wearing.