Birdy Kids

Lyon is a cultural and artistic hub second only to Paris in France. Fabulous architecture aside, it has well over 200 large-scale frescoes and trompe-l’œil, more than 60 of which were painted by the prolific Cité Création alone. On alternate years Lyon holds the Biennale d'Art Contemporain, currently in its 12th edition, and it runs the hugely popular annual Lumière international film festival, which this year featured Quentin Tarantino.

Take a walk around the city, and it's clear to see that Lyon also has a vibrant and active street art scene. I already wrote about one goldmine of street art in the disused factories along Rue Feuillat. I've also photographed a lot of noteworthy street art for the Invisible Lyon Instagram account.

However, the most omnipresent and instantly recognisable street art in Lyon stems from a three-man collective that calls itself Birdy Kids. Last week I interviewed the group's unofficial spokesman: Guillaume.

Gare des Brotteaux

A perfectly restored Haussmannian building with an ornate sandstone facade, huge bay windows, a curved roof and a large, central clock stands on Boulevard Jules Favre in Lyon's swanky 6th arrondissement. This is the former Gare des Brotteaux. 
 
The building's resemblance to the Gare d'Orsay in Paris is no coincidence, because the two were built in the same era. But this wasn't the first railway station on the site.

Ahmed the gargoyle

Like all monuments exposed to the perils of pollution, the Cathédral St. Jean-Baptiste in Lyon is constantly having to be cleaned and renovated. Even though the cleaning is done by laser nowadays rather than high-pressure water, which tended to scratch off yet more of the fine sandstone, sometimes the delicate centuries-old structures are so worn away by acid rain that they need to be replaced completely.

In 2010, it was decided that a gargoyle on the north wall of the cathedral - on the left-hand side if you're facing the front - had reached the "point of no return". Sculptor Emmanuel Fourchet was therefore given the task of designing and producing a suitable statue that might take its place. 

Rue Feuillat

A long wall interspersed by many tall windows and just as many rainwater pipes stretches most of the way along Rue Feuillat between Cours Albert Thomas and Avenue Lacassagne in the 3rd Arrondisement. Halfway down, an imposing stone gate with intricate ironwork and stained-glass clear denotes what must once have been the main entrance. Peering through the smashed safety glass of the windows, you can still see an elaborate iron roof and get a sense that this was once something big.

Big it was indeed. The stepped walls enclose a behemoth of a site spanning 75,000m² and employing nearly two thousand people in its heyday. For this is the oldest existing car factory in Lyon, although the grounds have changed hands many times over the last century.

Trotinettes

Lyon has an efficient and modern public transport network of underground, tram and bus lines. It also has an excellent city bike scheme, Vélo'v, which has been in operation since 2005 as a public-private partnership between the city and advertising company JCDecaux, with 350 hiring stations throughout the city and some 3000 bicycles which you can rent for just €1.50 for 24 hours (provided you change bicycles every 30 minutes). 

Transport operator TCL also has an extremely handy iPhone app which not only calculates journey times on public transport from any point in the city, but provides real-time information about where Vélo'v stations are located and - more importantly - how many bicycles and bike parking spaces are available at each.

But the real people-mover in Lyon in the literal sense of the word is the humble scooter, or trotinette, as it is known in French. Light, portable, collapsible and practical, the scooter has become far more than a children's plaything on the streets of Lyon.

Lyonnais mystery no. 1

An odd collection of buildings on the corner of Avenue Rockefeller and Boulevard Pinel in the 8th arrondissement presented me with my first Lyonnais mystery. Squat, rectangular and almost windowless, these three strange, flat-roofed buildings seemed so out of place, so different from the surrounding architecture, that they immediately drew my attention. 

 I'd first noticed them when I looked out of my hotel window. There, at the far end of a fenced-off sort of no-man's-land of tall grass next to the Grand Mosque in the Quartier Mermoz, stood three tall buildings, each about the length and breadth of a football pitch and two floors high, with what looked like watchtowers and aerial walkways running between them. Each was very different in its own way, though they clearly belonged together. But what the Guignol could they be?

Hôtel-Dieu

Like a dowager reclining on the banks of the river while her grandchildren frolic in the water, a once-stunning princess whose best days are long since behind her, the massive Hôtel-Dieu sprawls along the west side of the presque-île; the wedge of land in the centre of Lyon at the tip of which the city's two rivers, the Rhone and Saône, merge. For although it is one of the largest buildings in Lyon, it goes largely unnoticed by the people, cars and even the waters that rush by this locked and shuttered behemoth.