Marseilles: Tough love

Arriving at Marseilles’s Gare St Charles in the early hours of a balmy October night, the first marvel of the city that is pointed out to me — both proudly and affectionately — is a large, well-fed rat that pours itself into a nook in the stone wall of the station. ‘Welcome to Marseilles,’ says Oliver, my laconic host, pushing his bicycle along the street to avoid running into a trio of high-cheekboned Maghrebian hip-hop devotees. As they saunter past, deltoids rippling, bouncing fluidly and elegantly on their toes to some innate city beat, Oliver adds, ‘Also known as North North Africa.’

With a population of 850,000 (1.6 million within the greater city limits), Marseilles is France’s second largest city, dwarfed only by Paris. Both cities have a large Moroccan/Tunisian/Algerian contingent, but while in Paris immigrants end up in the banlieues, in Marseilles everyone gets piled into the centre. When it comes to atmosphere, even though it’s 660km from the capital, Marseilles is a million miles from safe, polished Le Ville Lumière (not to mention the other tourist towns of the Cote D’Azur: St Tropez, Monte Carlo, Cannes). A port town, Marseilles is crowded, chaotic and ghetto-edgy. But you’ll must visit soon, because it may not be for much longer.

When I visited, much of the city was under construction, for in 2013 it is a European Capital of Culture, an honour shared with Košice in Slovakia. The initiative, for which cities prepare a year-long programme of cultural events, began in 1985 and rapidly spread through Europe’s smaller capitals — Athens, Amsterdam, Madrid, Stockholm — waving its fairy wand of rejuvenation. Now it spotlights more obscure cities that could do with a tidy up (viz. Liverpool in 2008), doing wonders for municipal confidence (and possibly lining a few pockets; but let’s not let cynicism ruin things).

My visit, then, is a bit mistimed: Marseilles’s many museums are a mess of construction works, the old port is all fenced off while cobbling takes place, and the area beside La Cathédrale de la Major — the stripy, bedomed Romeo-Byzantine 19th-century Catholic Cathedral — is piled with beer bottles and cans (a relatively typical Marseilles sea view foreground).