Paris’ Eleventh Arrondissement
The eleventh arrondissement is a lively, vibrant and youthful residential district with a strong sense of community. In earlier days an exclusively working class quarter, the last decade has seen a massive influx of students and upcoming young professionals, attracted by cheaper rents and a trendy bar scene.
Despite gentrification, the eleventh has retained it’s sense of community - streets filled with small, family businesses and a busy weekend market at Bastille bear witness to the residents’ local pride.
The 11th arrondissement offers famous nightlife, centred around two locations. The narrow streets just east of Bastille (centred around Rue De Lappe and Rue De la Roquette) are lined with pubs, clubs and restaurants, and busy all nights of the week. Off the tourist trail, but equally vibrant, is the stretch of Rue Oberkamp just east of Metro Parmentier, which is packed with small but fashionably scruffy bars. The eleventh’s wide variety of drinking holes may not now be as trendy as they once were - but there’s still plenty of fun to be had.
While the 11th district can’t claim to host any of Paris most famous monuments, there’s also plenty of history here. Its working class population proved so willing to take up arms during the wave of revolutions and counter revolutions that hit the nation throughout the nineteenth century that the concerned authorities paved over the local canal - ensuring their armies easy access to clamp down on the district’s troublemakers.
Until the early twentieth century public executions were held on Rue De la Roquette, outside the notorious, now demolished, Roquette prison - during the Second World War the occupying German authorities used the prison to house captured French Resistance fighters, and a park has now been laid out in their memory.
It’s a pleasant quarter, but it is crowded - with it’s tall, narrow appartment blocks packed with studios and small flats, the quarter is the most densely populated part of Paris, and one of the most densely populated areas in Europe.
More Paris districts:
1st - Louvre 11th - Bastille
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