Belleville street art walking tour

Belleville street art walking tour

Take a walking tour with Street Art Paris Tours & Workshops to discover the finest street art and graffiti in the Belleville neighbourhood and learn all about the street artists who produce this work. During the tour, expect to discover as many as fifty different artists, as well as visit an underground gallery curated by an ancient artists collective, and have the chance - without any pressure - to buy some French Banksy, and visit the spiritual home of French graffiti culture, Rue Dénoyez.

Street Art Paris is a network of artists, educators and documentarians, involved locally in the graffiti and street art culture, through local actions, and a spirit of sharing, community and inclusivity. We lead tours and offer art workshops as a way to support a certain rhythm of life, but also as a way to meet people from different places, without ever needing to leave home.

Itinerary
This is a typical itinerary for this product

Stop At: Parc de Belleville, 47 rue des Couronnes, 75020 Paris France

The park reaches the second highest point on land in Paris after Montmartre, with a view over the entire city, and a range of different painted graffiti and street art by Parisian, French and international artists, where we stop for a short while to talk and explore.

Duration: 10 minutes

Stop At: Belleville neighbourhood, Paris France

The eponymous neighbourhood of Belleville, where North African, Muslim and Jewish, communities live and run businesses side-by-side, the Chinese community is large enough for it to be renowned as Paris' second Chinatown, sub-Saharan Africans sell corn on the cob barbecued using charcoal stoves set into shopping trolleys, vice permeates every back alley, and main boulevard, and bohemian life lives and breathes, with the plethora of bars and cafes busy every evening with students, artists and musicians singing and dancing into the early morning. Since Street Art Paris started giving tours in 2012, the area has seen a great deal of gentrification, so jump onboard while the party is still alive and happening, before it gets packaged up on Tripadvisor and these tourist tours put an end to the party.

Duration: 45 minutes

Stop At: Rue Denoyez, 75020 Paris France

The spiritual home of Paris graffiti, which is awash with every kind of sticker, tag, sculpture, paste-up, stencil and anything else you could possibly imagine as an artistic medium (poo poo and wee wee, not excluded). Having been half-closed down in recent years after the squatted artists studios were demolished to make way for a children's creche - which is hard to criticise, annoyingly - people have adapted to the new topography, and one of the main local personalities, stencil magician, Pedro Dorian has absorbed himself into an artists collective that operates a rootsy gallery space, and at the other end of the street there's now a trendy bookshop-cum-coffee shop, which invites artists to install works on its frontage, which is less smelly and poor than the old model, which Tripadvisor users prefer as a part of their urban art walking tour experiences, so tickets for Street Art Pris' tours continue to sell. Email ahead, however, if you wish for us to provide you with sanitary latex gloves and paper masks. This attraction does not require a mandatory pre-travel vaccination.

Duration: 15 minutes

Stop At: Aux Folies, 8 Rue de Belleville, 75020 Paris, France

Aux Folies bar, is where we may, or may not, stop for a coffee with you, mid-tour. Sitting at the end of the unsanitary, Rue Denoyéz, which is as mentioned previously, the spiritual home of Paris graffiti and street art - we're happy to provide latex gloves and paper masks in request - legend has it that Folies was at a time frequented by the late French diva, Édith Piaf, who was born a few hundred metres up the same street, on the steps of her mother's apartment building, on mornings when she desired awful coffee and great croissant. Piaf's mother was a prostitute, which isn't a diss, it's a link to what the neighbourhood once was, and still is to this day. Drugs, sex and booze, and art and music, is what makes Belleville, Belleville. Vice aside, however, and the, like central Paris generally is very safe for tourists. And still a safe place to pick up cocaine and marijuana. The police station had bullets fired at the glass frontage and closed a few years ago. The bar still retains the same charm as in the early 1900s it's imagined from a review on Google, as follows: "The place looks nice, but seemed like it didn't have much space for large groups. The music selection was pretty bad in my opinion, but at least it was relatively quiet so you don't have to shout to talk with people. The bartender corrected my pronunciation of "Provence" without being asked to, and I found that a bit rude." It's how Parisians treat the English-speaking tourists that continues to make the struggle all worthwhile. Although the review is factually incorrect, as the bar is packed out to the street's edge every night. La vie en rose, or the Aux Folies signage, more a brothel red colour.

Duration: 15 minutes

Stop At: Marche Belleville-Menilmontant, 63 boulevard de Belleville, 75011 Paris France

The Marché Belleville formerly known as the Marché Ménilmontant was settled in 1858. Aside from the usual - fruit and vegetables, flowers, meat, bread, cheese, fish and a great deal of North African specialities - the market vendors' trucks which line the boulevard are all covered top to bottom in graffiti by Parisian graffiti writers.

Duration: 10 minutes

Stop At: Eglise Notre-Dame de la Croix de Menilmontant, 3 Place de Menilmontant, 75020 Paris France

Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix church is a neo-Romanesque-cum-neo-Gothic nineteenth century church, in this working class neighbourhood, and the second biggest church is Paris. A number of years ago, the church allowed a street art intervention on its stairs as a means to attract publicity. Covertly wheatpasting a giant painting of the church itself onto the stairs, as if Banksy himself (Jesus of graffiti culture) had stopped by for Sunday service, leaving the work on the doorstep. The church, seeking to adapt to societal trends in order to stay ahead and appear to be attuned to our modern lives to ensure it maintains a lead in the spiritual marketplace, is even involved in the Belleville graffiti scene. Applause.

Duration: 5 minutes