Today, President Emmanuel Macron will open the last of the big Olympics-linked projects, probably the most important. Not another stadium, but a metro station: Saint-Denis-Pleyel. This is the new terminus of the high-speed line 14 christened Project Météor, which will link the southern Orly airport with the northern suburbs around Saint-Denis.
More stations will open by the end of the year, and it will be the longest of Paris’s 16 Metro lines , at 30km with 21 stations. Read Next The chic French island where you'll escape the British tourist crowds Saint-Denis has long been notorious for the drugs, violence and racial unrest depicted in the 1995 film La Haine, but for planners of the Grand Paris project, it is a future Eldorado. Macron described the region as a potential new California , and the 2024 Olympics bid was conceived as a key building block in this vision.
What happened in de-industrialised East London for the 2012 London Games is happening now in Paris. Derelict land is being transformed into smart living and entertainment facilities. You can study the entire project from 130m above the Métro station.
On this great urban plain once known as the “Manchester of France”, sports facilities, food courts and lots and lots of new flats are springing up. I’m 39 floors up in the Skybar of the H4 Hotel Wyndham Pleyel , the latest reincarnation of the Tour Pleyel, an iconic 1970s skyscraper office block named after France’s premier piano manufacturer. Below is.
