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Home / Lifestyle / Travel

Aug 12 2015 at 12:31 PM

Updated Aug 12 2015 at 12:31 PM

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Lyon: France's second city reinvents itself

Don't go to Lyon at the weekend, because it is shut, writes Robert
Bevan.

The Muse des Confluences is Lyons version of the Bilbao Guggenheim, a $400 million cultural edifice of
swooping glass and steel.

by Robert Bevan

"Lyon? Full of Protestants. Boring," sniffs a Parisian friend. But how can somewhere
billed as the gastronomic capital of France, a city once the capital of Roman Gaul and

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now a World Heritage Site for its 2000-year urban history, be boring?
Lyon is not boring, but the Parisienne has a point: Don't go at the weekend because it
is shut. Well, not the whole place, but many of its signature restaurants, the 21
ofcially recognised bouchons that serve traditional Lyonnaise worker fare: tripe,
frogs' legs, escargots, quenelles, pigs' ears every beret-wearing, stripy-shirted, oniondangling French standard. Restaurants tend to close after Saturday lunch and open

With their beef cheeks casserole in mind, I approached L'Acteur, tiny, basic and
cafeteria-like on pretty Place des Clestins. It looked great but closed before the
advertised time; "non" to a request for a table after 13.30 on a Saturday. No long

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lunches here. Come back on Tuesday. A disheartened trudge to a chance place on the
corner leads to an overpriced gelatinous cte d'agneau that takes home cooking to a
whole new level of low.
There are bouchons aplenty in Old Lyon but they are all full. This truly lovely left bank
quartier is slipped between a steep hill crowned by a Roman amphitheatre and the
Sane, the smaller of the two rivers that run north-south through the city. The other is
the Rhne. The narrow Renaissance streets of Old Lyon have a avour of Tuscany
(Lyon is as close to Italy as to Paris; a city of the south as much as the north) and a
unique feature are its traboules, decorative arcaded passageways hidden away in inner
courtyards.

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The Muse des Confluences is Lyons version of the Bilbao Guggenheim, a $400 million cultural edifice of
swooping glass and steel.

There are dozens of them, but most are hidden behind heavy doors, tantalisingly

glimpsed as the locals come and go. The streets and the bouchons here are mobbed
with tourists, some stopping for lunch from river cruises that run between Burgundy
and Arles.
Eager to shake off its stodgy reputation as a comfortably bourgeois place that
researches pharmaceuticals and electronics and uses its historic river banks as car
parks, Lyon has been making a determined effort to reinvent itself. The river banks of
the Sane and the Rhne forming a Y-shape either side of the peninsula that holds
the city centre, La Presqu'le have been landscaped, dotted with bars and sculpture
and given over to strolling, cycling or dancing on moored barges. The old opera house
has been doubled in height by architect Jean Nouvel, giving it a contemporary glass
barrel vault.
At the southern end of the peninsula is the Conuence district where the rivers meet
(obviously) and once the home of Lyon's docks and industry. It is cut off from the rest
of the city centre by an astonishingly ugly elevated railway station and the "Motorway
of the Sun" that links Paris with the sunny Med. This huge area is given over to a 70hectare regeneration program. Architects from all over Europe have built apartment
blocks, the old prison is becoming a university, the remaining former wholesale
markets put to a variety of uses (including the occasional dance party). Customs
house, warehouse and sugar store are now wine bar, TV station and waterfront arts
centre.
Five years late, the regeneration strategy's jewel in the crown recently opened at the
peninsula's southern tip: the Muse des Conuences is Lyon's version of the Bilbao
Guggenheim, a $400 million cultural edice of swooping glass and steel by celebrated
Viennese deconstructivists Coop Himmelb(l)au. It holds permanent anthropology
collections, temporary exhibitions and various music and art happenings. Instant icon
status then?

Renaissance houses in the rue Fernand Ray traboule, in Lyon's La Croix-Rousse.

Well, no, because it is a piss-poor example of an already overtired and overfed

architectural genre. Crouched like a crystalline toad at the gusset of the Y, much of its
oor space is given over to acrobatic staircases and pointless lobbies; a place for
Lyon's suburbanites to push their strollers safe from the Sunday rain.
The permanent exhibitions couldn't be more French and that's not said like it's a
good thing: the French are not great at contemporary exhibition curation, given to
larding the mundane with spurious musings. In a gallery dedicated to eternity, videos
of French philosophers ruminating on mortality sit cheek-by-jowl with Egyptian
mummies. Another gallery examines cultural exchange by exhibiting a row of
toasters between Dorothy Napangardi's painting Salt on Mina Mina and a display on
authoritarianism in Edo-period Japan. Truly random.There is, it must be admitted,
some beautifully displayed taxidermy and butteries next to a lm about Oscar
Pistorius.
At the summit of the building is a caf where if you order a coffee and a mini-quiche
you are given a token for the coffee machine and a plate to heat up the quiche yourself
in a microwave. Where there should be ne dining is ditch water. This in the nation
that gave us the Michelin-starred experience.
Why is Lyon taking lessons from Bilbao, a small provincial nowhere in northern
Spain? Lyon invented cinema, it had France's rst railway and the superb skills of its
extensive silk industry are on display in a stunning applied arts museum and historic
weaver's houses. The Muse des Conuences exhibits have simply been moved from a
rather lovely old national history museum up river. Why is the city building novelty

architecture in the Conuence when most traboules are closed to visitors? Why,
indeed, are people gawping at stuffed penguins down at the Conuence when back in
the city centre the 17th-century former abbey that holds the Muse des Beaux
Arts, with entire rooms dedicated to Tintoretto and Veronese and where there's a
shabbily gentile and sunny terrace for an apro stands empty of visitors?

Lyon is situated at the junction of two rivers: the Sane and the Rhne. supplied

It seems that whenever Lyon tries to be like somewhere else it fails. Unfortunately,
this is not a new phenomenon. High above the city, the oridly ugly Notre Dame de
Fourvire basilica is a late-19th-century version of Marseille's hilltop church.
(Marseille has one so we want one). Never mind that at the foot of the same hill is the
Gothic cathedral of St Jean, a golden stunner in a sleepy sunlit square. Meanwhile, on
closer inspection, Jean Nouvel's remodelled opera house is an exercise in smudgy
black nishes that are already looking tired. Its foyer is a place for breakdancers to
practise. Breakdancing in 2015? Get with the program, kids.
Lyon should instead be giving us something more authentically Lyon. It is not like the
city can't turn on the charm, as it does each year for its festival of light. And at the
opposite end of the peninsula from the conuence are the steep hills of La CroixRousse neighbourhood, once the domain of silk workers. It is now Lyon's bobo
neighbourhood linked together by ights of steps and a wheezy funicular. There's Rue
Romarin for vintage clothing, Rue Burdeau for art galleries and Rue Royale for a slew
of restaurants that suggest that Lyon hasn't been entirely resting on its culinary
bayleaves.
There are new hotels too, including a branch of funky Mama Shelter (a bit of a

distance from the centre in an up-and-coming student area) and the glam OKKO
chain that has opened opposite Pont Lafayette, with stunning views across the river
(although the subdivided rooms are taller than they're wide and a bit mustysmelling). Work has also started on transforming the 17th-century Htel-Dieu de Lyon
into a waterfront InterContinental hotel.
The cars, meanwhile, have been pushed into underground car parks that are
themselves art works back at Place des Clestins is a great example. Here, an
underground parking drum like a spiralling traboule has a rotating mirror at the
bottom so that the whole thing acts as a giant kaleidoscope. The tourism ofce does
car-park tours. Still, it's a poor substitute for timely beef cheeks.
Lyon doesn't need to be anywhere else, it just needs to get over its second-city
insecurities and become more intensively itself. And it might want to think about
those opening times along the way.

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