Hello and rebonjour!
It is December 2020 and I'm back out on the streets of Paris,
partly because I can’t legally go anywhere else at the moment,
but also because, well,
earlier this year I made a video about the fake building façades in the city,
and I think at this point a proper YouTuber is supposed to say something like
“if you haven’t seen it go and check it out!!!!!1”
but to be fair,
you probably have seen it,
because YouTube spammed it to about half the planet.
Anyway towards the end of that video, I said this:
“There are in fact at least another FIVE fake façades in Paris
- that we know about -
so there's more to explore. But for today we'll end our tour here"
...and at the time I was genuinely planning to just leave it there,
because how many people really are interested in fake Parisian building façades?
And then this happened,
and here we are.
So today we’re going to try and find the ones that we didn’t see last time.
And you know what?
We already went past one of them in this intro.
So let’s go and find 5 more fake Parisian building façades.
We’re starting here in the in the neighbourhood of La Villette
in the northeast corner of Paris
because on this road there is an EDF electricity substation
that they’ve tried to disguise as an office building
so that it fits in with the rest of the street
and if you think you’ve heard me say that before somewhere
then you’ll know we’re not exactly expecting a work of art…
See if you can spot it!
To be fair to EDF,
if there’s one thing we can say about number 14 rue Duvergier,
it’s that it's not quite as bad as the one in the first video.
And as usual, it’s up to Paris’s public transport company, the RATP,
to show them how it’s done
because there is another electrical substation hiding on this road
and this one is a lot harder to spot.
Number 54 rue des Petites Ecuries looks like a classic beautiful Parisian residence
but it isn’t.
(As you can tell if you look closely at the front door.)
In fact this site supplies power to the trains that run beneath us here
on lines B and D of the regional express network,
running through the same tunnels
that needed a ventilation shaft
that’s hidden behind another fake façade
that we visited in the first video.
Btw the addresses of all of the buildings in this video and the last one
are listed publically on this Wikipedia page
so today we’re just ticking off the ones that we didn’t see before,
and next up is another electrical substation
over at number 141 boulevard Diderot.
But here even the RATP seem to have given up on disguising it.
I feel like this one barely qualifies for the list,
no-one’s trying to pretend that THAT is a normal building.
But before people start commenting about how maybe I shouldn’t use Wikipedia as my main source of research
let’s hop across Paris to the northeastern corner
and the neighbourhood of Batignolles.
This is a relatively quiet and residential area
away from the main tourist hotspots,
in fact back in the day it used to be home to the painter Edouard Manet,
as well as former Wales and Swindon Town left back Paul Bod...
...19th century French engineer Paul Bodin.
But round the corner on rue la Condamine,
one of the houses is not quite what it seems.
And again, you could easily go past this one without noticing anything weird
but no-one lives at number 78.
What you’d find behind those windows
is a big server farm.
In fact Googling the address brings up the website of a French data hosting company
who pride themselves on storing their data phyiscally in France
and being 100% French,
and they’re called,
let me get the pronunciation right,
Global Service Provider.
And that leaves us with one final fake façade to find,
and well
it wouldn’t be a Tim Traveller video about fake façades
without a ventilation shaft,
so we’re heading back up towards the Gare du Nord,
just around the block from where we finished the last video,
because number 3 rue de l’Aqueduc
is another part of the whole Gare du Nord ventilation system.
This time it's for the underground platforms on Line E.
However in this case it’s only the first floor of the building that’s fake -
the rest of the floors are real.
Including, apparently, the garage.
So while I quickly get myself out of the way,
that’s about it for fake facades in Paris.
I'll put a link in the description to a Google map
that shows you where you can find all 11 addresses
that I’ve visited in the two videos,
please do comment below if you know any more
or if you know some in the city where you live,
otherwise feel free to do what everyone did last time
and argue about whether or not façade means fake
and if it does then isn’t it redundant to say "fake façades"...
whatever you want to do, thank you for watching
and I will see you soon.