Exploring the Untamed Labyrinth of Marseille
22 June 2023
When I arrive in Marseille by train, I like to stand on the bluff where Saint-Charles station is perched, soaking up a vista that never fails to take my breath away and feeling intoxicated by the madness. I travel to this city for its refusal to be glamorous despite its beauty. If Marseille lost its grime, it would lose its soul, and though the city is old, it isn’t a museum. Its history is alive and layered. The station, built in 1848, looks out on a balmy, barmy red labyrinth that is as African as it is European, with a golden Mary Magdalene glistening in the sun atop a Catholic basilica that commands the city as dramatically as Christ the Redeemer does in Rio de Janeiro. Marseille is sometimes described as the Rio of Europe, mostly with negative connotations: drugs, gangs, and poverty. However, the city shares Rio’s virtues too. I anchor myself with the singular topography – the hills, the icons, and the coastline – and never truly feel lost.
The train station has been bruised by its life as a functioning part of the city, and its faded stone, darkened in its crevices by pollution and covered in seagull droppings, only makes it more picturesque. The ornate staircase is adorned with sculptures of Asian and African muses – lions, flowers, fruit, and wine – there to remind me that I have arrived in a land of abundant riches, the capital of Provence and the old French gateway to Africa. The stairs lead onto a long boulevard of pink limestone buildings that turn to embers when the sun is low. The throbbing lava flow of brake lights adds more red, as do the inner glows of gregarious Algerian and Tunisian cafés that spill onto the pavements.
Beyond this is the sea, the adhesive that connects Marseille to the Maghreb and the Med. It’s impossible to confuse Paris and Cairo, but Marseille and Alexandria, the most Mediterranean cities in France and Egypt, are clearly cousins, linked by liquid history. They are both places of tarot cards, blue-eye pendants, tanned skin, and dark hair in tight curls – and a people whose expression comes in on the winds of the sirocco, the levante, the ostro, the libeccio or, in the case of Marseille, the mistral. Locals claim that the mistral is what makes the Marseillais unpredictable. It has even been used in courts to justify a failure of judgement.
On arrival this time, I was snapped out of my reverie by an Algerian taxi driver called Fayssal. His speakers blasted old-school French hip-hop: Akhenaton (from the group IAM, Marseille’s answer to Wu-Tang Clan) and his anthem “Bad Boys de Marseille”. On the journey to my hotel, Fayssal got into fiery arguments with three drivers. As we drove along the congested Corniche, the coastal road heading out towards Les Calanques, a national park, I found myself in a pleasing state of cognitive dissonance. Inside the car was a cacophony of cursing in Arabic and French, over what Shazam told me was an album by a newer-generation rapper called Jul. But I wound down the window to feel the mistral and look at the dramatic Mediterranean in that blue: cobalt, azure, Capri, pick your cliché. It was right there, framed by red-gold walls covered in ageing, sun-bleached graffiti and gaudy adverts.
Marseille is a city of clichés. Everything people say about it is true, including the lies. “This is a crazy city,” Fayssal told me after shouting down a moped rider with a death wish, “but I love it.” He smiled in a way that summed up the bittersweetness of a place that’s at once bad-tempered and good-natured. A place where, whether someone is looking for a friend or a fight, they’ll find it. Though it has many monikers, my favourite is IAM’s: “Planète Mars”. The hue of the city is dusty rouge, and it is indeed its own world.
In his 2010 work Marseille Mix, architect William Firebrace reminds us that in England we sometimes write “Marseilles”, using the plural. And though the Marseillais consider this old-fashioned, the pluralisation of the city rings true. Phocean sailors settled on the shores here in 600 BC, making this France’s oldest city, and the sprawl has built up organically over centuries in waves of arrivals and undesirables. There are large North African, Arabic, Italian, and Corsican communities and a white working-class French population. Small villages have been gradually subsumed into the city, so while each area is distinct, multiculturalism is embedded almost everywhere. Sometimes the proximity causes conflict but, more often than not, the Marseillais as a collective are fiercely proud, and their differences create conviviality. After all, people usually argue most with their families. It’s telling that, despite Marseille’s reputation, when nationwide riots set France alight in 2005, it was one of the few big cities to abstain from violence. Marseille is French, but not France.
I arrived at the Tuba Club, my digs for the first days. Dusk was creeping in and that Riviera blue was dimming to indigo, pierced with horizontal shards of rose-gold sun. On a busy road, I buzzed the unpromising door of what looked like a cramped beach shack. But then stairs led me down into a large space flooded with light, life, and people, a hidden world against the rocky coastline. It felt like I had gatecrashed a cool house party in Miami, with Curtis Mayfield floating from the speakers. There was no reception. After I’d been loitering for a few minutes, Greg Gassa, one of the owners, greeted me, smiling knowingly and saying, “There is no check-in: your room is over there and the door is open. Your keys are hung up. Make yourself at home. Want a drink?” And suddenly I was in an elegantly casual room, with a Tunisian rug on tomato-coloured flooring and a book about Marseille football legend Basile Boli resting against the wall. There were navettes (fragrant Marseillais biscuits made from a 200-year-old recipe) on my bed and a crisp glass of white on a window ledge against a view of the Mediterranean, a ’70s soul soundtrack scoring the glorious sunset.
The atmosphere at Tuba is unlike anywhere, yet also feels very Marseille. There is a familiarity to proceedings, but the music is curated, the decor expert, and the food extraordinary, with a shifting menu based on whatever the fishermen catch that morning. After falling asleep, lulled by the pleasant mash-up of muffled music, the thrum of diners, and the white noise of evening waves crafted by a bone moon, I woke for a swim in the warm sea footsteps from my room, then sat on a towel to share a glass of ice-cold Coca-Cola with Gassa and Fabrice Denizot, the duo behind Tuba Club. They looked like midlife surfers: healthy, happy beach bums living the dream. Sons of Marseille, they attended school together before going off to pursue careers in marketing and the movie industry. They worked all over the world, especially in the USA, which perhaps accounts for the Miami vibes, but Denizot told me that they reconnected when both living in Paris. “When we were young, even if you loved this city, if you wanted to do something you had to leave,” he said. “There was nothing here. But that began to change in 2013, and people started to come back. Greg returned in 2014, and I came a couple of years later.”
In 2013 Marseille was named the European Capital of Culture, a huge EU programme that ploughed more than half a billion euros into regeneration. If Marseille has always been multicultural, 2013 made it international. The programme’s legacy is felt strongly at Vieux Port, where the Mucem, an impressive, award-winning art museum, has revitalised a once-scruffy city centre lined by disused docks. Gassa and Denizot were part of a wave of home-grown creatives encouraged to bring back talent. “We wanted to present all the things we loved from our travels, but with a Marseille twist,” Gassa told me. “We created this space as somewhere our friends would like to hang out and our new friends could come to relax, swim and calm down. We’re not trying to save the world. We only have five guest rooms, our restaurant, and the sea.”
I took off to connect with dancer and choreographer Marina Gomes, who works with disenfranchised communities in the quartiers nord. I met her at the beach, Plage du Prado, in a scene that made me think of a poem by British-Trinidadian writer Roger Robinson, “The City Kids See the Sea”: “Hijabs dripped, and Nikes squelched… / O city children you are as ancient as water”. Where else in Europe are there so many working-class Black and Arab kids engaging with nature? But if Marseille’s natural abundance offers comfort, it also presents vices.
“The kids who live in the cité estates in the quartiers nord have the same ocean view as those in the luxury hotels in the south of the city,” Gomes told me, “but their lives are completely different.” The city’s location, close to Italy and across from North Africa, means that there are issues with human and drug trafficking, and the north of the city lacks resources. Despite the demographics, there is a large far-right Rassemblement National presence, which Gomes puts down to a sense of alienation: not enough people are voting, so representation is lacking. When I visited La Castellane, a notorious cité where legendary footballer Zinedine Zidane was born, I noticed semi-derelict youth centres. Rap music is often the outlet for young people, as well as street dance, but it’s not enough.
Marseille is a city of simple pleasures, and all the best things about it are free: the sea, the strolls, the sunsets, the friendships. Who am I, as an outsider, to worry about this city becoming too fashionable? And yet I do. I’ve always loved this place because, despite all its natural beauty and investment, it remains charmingly mediocre. Children’s playgrounds are covered in graffiti and sometimes populated by old drunks; the buskers at the Vieux Port are only just about passable: ageing beatboxers and singers doing bad Bob Marley covers. I love the main thoroughfare, La Canebière, parts of which remind me of Francophone West African cities: faded modernism shoehorned into French Haussmann-era buildings, DIY signage, and bakeries that haven’t changed their 1960s shopfronts. Le Panier, the district where first-generation immigrants from North Africa traditionally settle, refuses to allow its quaintness to tip over into the saccharine. Despite its tiny winding streets, tied together by criss-crossing clotheslines and boutique shops that keep appearing and disappearing, it remains dogged by kamikaze kids on mopeds, an old man who sets fire to dustbins, rats the size of stray cats, and a rivalry between local ice-cream parlours rumoured to be money-laundering fronts for the mafia.
But I do see things changing. When I first visited in 2010, Marseille’s name was dirt in the mouths of Parisians, and now they are buying second homes there. The city is starting to export its rich artistic heritage. Many of Cézanne’s paintings were made in L’Estaque; Alexandre Dumas set The Count of Monte Cristo on the Château d’If, an island in Marseille’s Frioul archipelago; and Penguin, to much acclaim, has rereleased Romance in Marseille, a work written 90 years ago by Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay, who has a passage in Marseille named after him.
Rencontres d’Arles, one of Europe’s biggest photography festivals, is an hour away, and Henri Cartier-Bresson made some of his most notable early work here. Award-winning art-book publishers such as Chose Commune and Loose Joints have moved into town. These are welcome additions, but blowing in on the mistral is, of course, the G-word. I would not like to see this ancient city losing any of its soul to gentrification, with the people who make up its character – the working classes of many cultures – being pushed from its heart. Local friends I speak to are relaxed about the changes, believing that Marseille is too crazy to ever become too cool. But I don’t know.
For now, Marseille remains a working-class city and, though it is thoroughly Instagrammable (#MarseilleJeTaime has thousands of selfie-in-the-sunset posts), and designers such as Jeanne Damas have chosen the city to shoot their collections in, it surprises me how unfashionable it remains. I notice fewer hipsters per square mile than in most cities. “To find harmony in bad taste,” wrote Jean Genet, “is the height of elegance.” And that is Marseille. Long may it stay in bad taste.
The Marseille Address Book
These are the places to see, and be seen at, across the city of Marseille right now.
Stay: Tuba Club
Perfect for exploring the coastline, Tuba Club offers a break from the crazy city. Opened in 2020 with five compact rooms, it’s about the young crowd, ’70s vintage glam, and sensational fresh dishes, such as just-caught grilled Mediterranean seabass. Doubles from about £203
Stay: New Hotel Le Quai
In a converted Haussmann apartment block by the Vieux Port, these 48 rooms are spacious enough to feel more like townhouse apartments with a chilled, pared-back bohemianism. Doubles from about £120
Stay: Hôtel Le Corbusier
Designed by the legendary Le Corbusier in 1952, the Cité Radieuse building defined high-rise living post-war. There’s a school, a gallery, and a paddling pool on the roof terrace. This three-star hotel is not without quirks but is unforgettable. Doubles from about £83
Eat and drink: Trattoria Monticelli
Food critic Jonathan Meades told me that Marseille’s pizzas are unmatched outside Naples because of the city’s old Italian community. Monticelli is a personal favourite for its chunky ones in a smart neighbourhood setting.
Eat and drink: Café de l’Abbaye
Perched high above the Vieux Port, Café de L’Abbaye is filled with locals drinking apéro with panisses – deep-fried chickpea discs – and watching the sunset.
See: La Friche la Belle de Mai
Originally a tobacco factory, La Friche is a multi-use cultural centre with a basketball court, playground, and a terrace for gigs and screenings.
See: Ensemble
Henri Cartier-Bresson bought his first Leica in Marseille, and the city remains steeped in photography culture. Two photobook publishers are based here: Chose Commune and Loose Joints, the latter with a shop, Ensemble, in Le Panier.
