Garage Atlas

Walking or driving along the Avenue Maréchal-de-Saxe in Lyon's 3rd arrondissement – especially in the summer, when the trees are full of leaves – it's easy to miss the seven-storey white Art Deco building that takes up an entire block at numbers 65-69 and continues along adjacent along Rue Le Royer, Rue de Bonnel and Rue Vendôme. 

If you do spot it, you are most likely to notice the lines and geometric shapes covering the façade and the somewhat dated-looking restaurant that occupies part of the ground floor of the huge building on the Avenue de Saxe side. Glance up at the sign above the central door framed between two Doric columns, and you get a hint about the listed building's former life. 

The restaurant's name? 'Le Garage'.

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.