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I think it’s fair to say that Nantes doesn’t have a Reform led council, but let’s not digress….. I thought I’d better explain what I was trying to achieve in France last week beyond walking around in excessive heat and photographing municipal art.

The basic plan was, as ever, reassuringly simple. I had booked a cheap Ryanair flight to Nantes for Monday and needed to be back in Norwich by Friday for London Craft Beer Festival, which was an important professional and cultural commitment I was not intending on missing. Ideally, I wanted to return on Thursday, giving me enough time to be ready for the event in London that started on Friday morning.

My preferred option was a £9 Wizz Air flight using my Wizz Multipass, although availability is only revealed three days before departure. This adds a pleasing element of suspense to travel planning, rather like waiting for lottery results except that the prize is Luton Airport. When the flights appeared, the nearest suitable departure was not from Nantes or anywhere that could reasonably be described as nearby. It was from Lyon, on the other side of France, introducing the relatively minor logistical challenge of crossing a substantial portion of the country to take advantage of a £9 airfare.

I first checked the direct trains from Nantes to Lyon and discovered that French railways were apparently under the impression that I wished to purchase part of the train rather than merely sit on it. The fares were considerably higher than I had expected, threatening to undermine the entire financial achievement of the £9 flight. To show the challenge I faced, the train journeys were showing at around £300 and I wasn’t paying that.

Fortunately, continued research eventually revealed a cheaper train from Nantes to Le Mans. By “continued research”, I mean approximately three hours of opening tabs, rejecting fares and moving imaginary passengers around France like pieces on a railway-themed board game. Le Mans did not get me especially close to Lyon in any immediate geographical sense, but the ticket was affordable and the journey allowed me to spend a night in another city, which I naturally regarded as an advantage rather than an additional complication.

The resulting itinerary involved flying to Nantes, travelling to Le Mans, spending the night there, continuing across France to Lyon and then flying back to Britain for £9. To some people this might appear unnecessarily elaborate, but those people do not understand the quiet satisfaction of assembling a journey from a collection of individually cheap components. Other people have high powered jobs and families to manage, I have to work out how to get home without spending £300 on a train. Well, we all have our burdens I suppose.

So, what could possibly go wrong with this new competitive sport I’ve started playing of cheap and complex travel?

I was only staying in Nantes for one night as I had to get to Lyon, more on which in the next post actually, and I decided to have a walk around the city taking in the Mechanical Elephant. It meant around an hour of walking, but I had plenty of stops given the extreme heat in Nantes, although it was fortunately a little cooler than the previous day. This also meant that I could walk for several minutes at a time before needing to stand in the shade and reconsider every decision that had brought me to western France in July.

Anyway, the photo above is ‘Éloge du pas de côté’, or ‘In Praise of the Sidestep’, a bronze sculpture by Philippe Ramette in Place du Bouffay. Created for Le Voyage à Nantes in 2018, it shows a suited man stepping beyond the edge of his pedestal, celebrating the idea of looking at the world differently rather than obediently remaining where public monuments are usually expected to stand.

I thought I’d take a photo of a Nantes tram as, well, this is the sort of riveting content on which I thrive. There I stand, phone in hand, and a man decides to walk over, stop and read his newspaper. I decided this felt like a traditional French scene, so there we go.

This is Feydball, a permanent public artwork created for Le Voyage à Nantes in 2015, combining a deliberately uneven, crescent-shaped football pitch with a large warped mirror. The reflective surface makes the distorted pitch and goalposts appear reassuringly normal while bending the players and ball out of shape instead, which is perhaps contemporary art’s most accurate contribution to amateur football. The site retains its natural slope and irregularities, so anyone attempting a serious match must contend with geometry, gravity and the possibility that the mirror is making them look considerably more athletic than they really are. This might encourage me to play more five-a-side to be fair if it made me look athletic as there’s only so much that bar billiards can do for my sporting physique.

This monument in Place de la Bourse commemorates Colonel Georges de Villebois-Mareuil, a Nantes-born French officer who volunteered to fight alongside the Boer republics against the British during the Second Boer War and was killed in South Africa in 1900. The bronze sculpture, created by Raoul Verlet and unveiled in 1902, shows the dying officer supported by an allegorical figure of France, complete with flag and enough heroic drama to remove any possibility that he had merely sat down for a rest. I assumed that they no longer held any ill-feeling towards the British over the arrangement.

And safely at the railway station with just 53 minutes to spare before my train as I like plenty of time to find my platform. This transpired to involve 18 minutes of staying in front of a giant fan, 14 minutes finding Carrefour to get a drink and 1 minute finding the platform before boarding the train early.

I’ve already uploaded a video of the Grand Éléphant, or Mechanical Elephant, to surprise and delight my myriad of two blog readers.

The Grand Éléphant is the most famous creation at Les Machines de l’Île, an artistic project developed on the former Nantes shipyards and inspired by the city’s industrial history, together with the imaginative worlds associated with Jules Verne. Inaugurated in 2007, the elephant is 12 metres high, 21 metres long and weighs 48.4 tonnes, so it’s not the most subtle of set-ups. Built from steel and wood, it moves through the old docklands at a stately one to three kilometres per hour, which is not especially rapid but is still quicker than some municipal regeneration schemes. There’s a staff member that walks with it to ensure that no pedestrians get flattened and there’s also a driver inside steering the arrangement.

Up to 50 passengers can climb aboard for a journey lasting around 30 minutes, with balconies and an upper terrace providing views across the former shipyards. Its legs, ears, eyes and trunk move through a combination of hydraulic, pneumatic and gas-powered cylinders, while the trunk can spray water over people standing nearby although I didn’t get too close to that. This is described as part of the entertainment, although it does perhaps introduce a useful element of jeopardy and uncertainty for anyone with expensive camera equipment. On this occasion though there was considerable restraint and no moment of collective panic. From the ground, the whole machine looks remarkably convincing to some degree, although obviously some imagination is required.

What makes the elephant particularly effective is that it is not confined inside a conventional attraction but walks through the public landscape of the Île de Nantes, turning the former industrial site into a piece of moving theatre. I hadn’t realised how close I would be able to get to it and there were plenty of people watching. It’s a bit expensive to actually take a ride on the elephant and exciting as that might have been, I thought it was just as satisfying watching for free nearby.

The only slight disappointment was that nobody was soaked by the elephant while I was watching, as this would have provided some additional material for the blog. The water spraying was really quite restrained, perhaps because of previous complaints or because the operators had correctly assessed the mood of the crowd. I had been hoping for at least one unsuspecting tourist to receive the full experience, entirely for documentary purposes, but the elephant behaved with impeccable moderation. It was still a spectacular and wonderfully eccentric creation, even if it declined to provide the minor public incident I had been waiting for.

More about this in the next riveting post, but, for now, here’s a little video below.

This is Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Port, a grand nineteenth-century church built close to the former harbour and dedicated to the Virgin Mary as protector of sailors. Its enormous dome and elaborate neoclassical façade give it a suitably commanding presence, suggesting that architectural modesty was considered and then rejected before the plans were approved. It’s a robust building though, I can imagine that the sailors liked it and I was also pleased that the authorities have put up an information board about it.

This is only a short post, which will likely come as a relief to my two loyal blog readers, as I did not go inside and therefore cannot offer my usual detailed assessment of the stonework, stained glass and available seating. It looked exceptionally grand from the exterior, although it was a shame that so many cars were parked directly in front of it, perhaps slightly compromising the intended effect of the monumental façade. Nineteenth-century architects rarely allowed for the possibility that their finest civic views would eventually become convenient places to leave a random assortment of Renaults.

These rather modest remains belonged to Porte Sauvetout, once one of the principal entrances through the medieval walls of Nantes. Situated on the north-western side of the city, the gate controlled the routes towards Vannes and Rennes, so anyone arriving from that direction would have been required to pass through it rather than simply wandering into Nantes in search of craft beer. Thank goodness for freedom of movement is all I can note….

Porte Sauvetout was far more substantial than the remaining masonry arrangement might suggest. The main gateway stood between the Haut-le-Pied and Erdre towers, with a drawbridge and additional defensive works protecting the approach. The towers were rebuilt in 1482 and 1483 to accommodate gunpowder artillery, as medieval military technology had advanced beyond merely dropping unpleasant objects onto people from above.

Like most of Nantes’s medieval fortifications, the gate was largely dismantled from the mid-eighteenth century onwards as the city expanded and reshaped itself, with the last stretches disappearing in the early nineteenth century. Its base survived, and was properly investigated archaeologically around 1999, ahead of construction work for Nantes’s third tramway line. The dig, lasting a couple of months, confirmed that the tower was in remarkably good condition below ground. It has a horseshoe-shaped plan, still measuring around 14 metres by 12.6 metres, and is preserved to a height of about 3.5 metres on its northern side.

As the photograph shows, steps lead down into the heart of the tower, although access is closed. This is perhaps fitting for what was once a defensive structure, as the original policy of discouraging casual entry appears to remain in force. It was still pleasing to see such a substantial fragment of medieval Nantes preserved among the modern streets and I liked that it had a little information board so I knew what I was looking at.

It was obviously too hot in Nantes as I decided to sit outside, something which I try to avoid whenever possible to avoid cigarette smoke, insects and the risk of others displaying joviality nearby. This was MADE Burger, which had excellent online ratings and looked sufficiently appealing to justify a proper investigation rather than my usual approach of staring through the window and making several unnecessary circuits of the block to find something which meets my needs.

Ordering was simple enough and I liked the provision of buzzers so that I know when food arrives, it’s always a slight faff if they’re trying to call out food orders in a language I don’t know. The buzzer meant that I could sit outside in peace, confident that it would eventually summon me rather than the food quietly cooling on a counter while a member of staff repeatedly called for someone who sounded a little like “Julien”.

This is their standard smash burger with cheese and bacon and the presentation seemed carefully thought through. The burger was juicy and had a depth of flavour, actually tasting of beef which is always positive. I would have preferred the bacon to be cooked more, although I accept that my enthusiasm for nearly cremated bacon is a matter of personal taste rather than a failure of the kitchen. The bun was soft and the chips were particularly good, crisp on the outside and soft and fluffy within, which is exactly what chips are meant to achieve despite the number of establishments that continue to treat this as an optional ambition

The beer is the Blanche Écume from Brasserie Mélusine, a quite fruity wheat beer, successfully completing the whole arrangement. Indeed, on the beer front, I was pleased that there was a choice of three different local beers, none of which I’d had before.

The venue was all rather on-trend and it was heavy on the branding and perhaps slightly formulaic, but as long as the food quality is high then I’m absolutely fine with that. It got a little busier outside whilst I was there, but fortunately there was no-one smoking, no insects and the frivolity level remained relatively low. I’m also pleased to note that the large canopy meant that the temperature of the outside area remained cool, as I might not have mentioned, but it was too hot in Nantes.

I was pleased to discover that there were numerous craft beer bar options in Nantes, certainly sufficient for my one night stay. This was Amère, which combines a craft beer shop with a bar and therefore allows customers both to drink beer immediately and to purchase additional beer for later, a business model based on understanding people properly.

The selection of cans and this seemed well curated with local and international breweries. I like the combination of familiar and entirely new to me, although it was too hot for me to traipse any of these cans around the city for later.

The beer board offered another respectable selection, although this was also when I discovered that my phone had no signal. This made checking Untappd to establish which beers I had already tried rather more difficult and required me to rely upon memory, instinct and the vague recognition of colourful labels. These are essentially the methods used by humanity before mobile data, although it is hard to imagine how civilisation survived without being able to confirm immediately that a beer had been rated 3.74 by 486 strangers. Many people just don’t understand the stress of ordering a beer without Untappd.

Despite the lack of Internet, I correctly guessed that I hadn’t had this beer before and it’s the Rouge Soleil from Fauve which is a small French brewer. It was a gently tart beer with cherries and fruit, all rather agreeable.

The bar area was clean and bright, with the service being friendly and prompt, although the lack of air conditioning meant that the temperature was on the hotter side. The outside seats were all full, which did limit my options somewhat. The venue also has a darts board cutting right across it, which is perhaps the only thing that was a little uncomfortable, but I liked the whole vibe in general.

Anyway, I liked this bar and the whole atmosphere of the arrangement, it’s always lovely to see craft beer done well. The venue is Untappd verified but they don’t display their craft beer list on the app which is a little unusual, but I was pleased with the options that there were. The only significant difficulty was leaving after one drink, but Nantes contained several more craft beer bars and I had responsibilities to the wider research project.

Outside the elegant neoclassical Théâtre Graslin, artist Théo Mercier has installed Fossil Opera, an enormous landscape of compacted sand, rubble and partially buried cars. And, no, this is not a art installation about Richard’s driving, but instead it’s meant to show an unusually selective earthquake which has destroyed the city but spared the opera house so that the survivors can still enjoy Carmen.

The installation was created for the 2026 edition of Le Voyage à Nantes and uses around 600 tonnes of sand, together with debris taken from local building sites and cars supplied by a nearby repair business. The cars also recall the relatively recent period when Place Graslin was open to traffic, ensuring that the motor vehicle has progressed from dominating public space to being buried beneath it, which is perhaps the most decisive pedestrianisation scheme yet attempted and I support the enthusiasm. Other cities might wish to adopt the same approach, particularly for vehicles parked across pavements, but I digress….

The work has predictably divided opinion, with some residents finding it imaginative and thought provoking and others apparently preferring their prominent city squares without simulated geological catastrophe. It has also attracted criticism because the sand requires regular watering during a period of exceptional heat (have I mentioned it was too hot in Nantes?), which adds an intriguing extra layer to an artwork partly concerned with environmental change. Once the exhibition ends, the sand, rubble and vehicles are intended to return to their original sources, leaving Place Graslin intact once again. But I’m very pleased to have seen this, I think that it’s one of my favourite large-scale art installations.