Paris, drawn from its own streets.

Paris on paper

The Seine draws a long open curve across the middle of the frame, and the two islands sit in it like stones in a stream — the only place in the city where the water has streets inside it. North and south of the river the boulevards take over. They were driven through the old fabric in the nineteenth century as straight, wide lines that meet at star junctions, and on paper those stars are the most obvious thing after the river: six, eight, sometimes twelve streets converging on a single point, with the older lanes still visible in the blocks between them.

That contrast is the reason Paris prints so well. In the Marais and around the Panthéon the pre-boulevard streets remain — short, angled, irregular — and the straight cuts run past them at a completely different scale. Montmartre keeps its own tangle on the hill in the north of the frame. The railway termini punch into the city from the edges as fans of track, each one a spray of curves ending abruptly in a station.

The parks and cemeteries read as pale blocks against very dense streets: the Luxembourg with its formal geometry, the Tuileries as a long rectangle beside the river, Buttes-Chaumont in the north-east, Père Lachaise as a walled grid of paths to the east. At ten kilometres across the frame holds the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre and from the Trocadéro to Belleville. Take it in to two and one arrondissement fills the paper with every courtyard street legible; take it out to twenty and the ring road closes around the whole thing.