Every design for Puteaux

In 1148 Abbot Suger, chief minister to Louis VI and Louis VII, set up a landed estate on the left bank of the Seine and called it Putiauz. The name probably came from an Old French word for a swamp, a fair description of the ground before it was drained for farming; another theory traces it to the Latin for 'little wells'. Suger granted the settlers privileges to lure them here, and the village slowly grew.

There is a strange pleasure in standing in the Bas de Puteaux, the oldest part of town between the railway and the river, and looking up at the towers of La Défense. The old church, the Hôtel de Ville of 1934 and the shops around rue Jaurès feel a world away from the Grande Arche de la Défense, though it stands on the same commune. Locals still repeat the legend that Puteaux inspired La Fontaine's fable of the gadfly. Across the Pont de Puteaux lies the Bois de Boulogne, with the Fondation Louis Vuitton not far away, and the Île de Puteaux sits in the river between.

If you are a Putéolien, you know both cities at once: the glass towers on the skyline and the quiet riverbank where you walked as a child. Keep them together.