Jardin Extraordinaire: This Time I Actually Looked at the Map

10/07/2026 — Canon AE1 Program — HP5+ and Fomapan, both at 100 ASA

It was 48°C in the car when I set off. Only 38°C when I got out. So still a bit warm.

I was back out with the Canon AE1 Program, this time to get more shots of the Voyage à Nantes. And I actually looked at the map today. Progress.

The bus stop at the bottom of the hill is called Carrière Misery. A quarry called Misery, at the entrance to a garden called Extraordinaire, with a concrete slab of an office block sitting behind it looking like it was designed by someone having a bad decade. I took the shot before I’d even got to the garden. Nantes does this. It hands you the joke on the way in.

The Jardin Extraordinaire is built into the bottom of the old quarry. You come down off an ordinary residential street and the ground simply stops, and there below you is a wall of rock with plants coming out of it — palms, bamboo, things with leaves the size of dustbin lids — and houses perched along the top edge looking down. Two waterfalls come off the face. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely works.

You won’t believe the number of children in the water. They were all trying, with varying degrees of determination and zero success, to find the elusive fraîcheur. It wasn’t there. It hasn’t been there for days. But you have to admire the optimism.

The pool at the foot of the cliff was full of them. Parents on the rocks around the edge with their feet in, a woman sitting on her own on the grass with her back to the lot of it, and a great wall of graffitied granite going straight up behind. I stood on the path above and let the whole thing fill the frame. It’s the best photograph I took in two days and I barely had to do anything.

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The green line runs through here too. I’d come for the garden and forgotten that the Voyage à Nantes doesn’t stop at the edge of the city centre — it comes out this far west as well, and the quarry is one of the places it lands.

Down among the planting there are concrete posts standing upright in the clearings. Square section, a couple of metres tall, the sort of thing you’d walk past on a building site without a second look. Except that every face of them is crusted with dried stems and leaves and ferns, pressed into the surface and left there to bleach. Up close they look less like sculpture and more like something the quarry did to itself — concrete that stood still long enough for the garden to start using it.

Which is, more or less, the whole point of the place. And a much better joke than anything I could write about it.

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Security got everyone at 19h30. Out came the children to their mothers to get dried off. The park was closing. I headed towards the riverside. Everyone was being so polite.

The walk out goes through Chantenay, which is the part of Nantes that hasn’t been tidied up yet, and long may that continue. A water tower painted all over with contour lines and a fish, standing on four legs above a workshop covered in tags. A skeleton bolted to a rooftop next to a sign with half its letters gone, a pair of trainers slung over the wires above it. A sticker on a lamp post: Rage Against the Machine à Laver. I laughed out loud on an empty street, on my own, in 38°C, like a man who has had too much sun.

Then a wall with DOCKS DE CHANTENAY spelled out in bulb letters and an arrow pointing the way, which is about as clear an instruction as I have ever been given.

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Part II: La Petite Little Atlantique Brewery

The word “brewery” conjures up ideas of pleasure and bad organisation of the proverbial Piss Up. Some might say session. Strangely enough, they make beer on the Loire River. Despite the on-site beer, I find the music too French, and too loud, despite being deaf. It’s 20h30 and the crowd seem to be 30-somethings with children. I found a place to sit next to a huge fan, which makes the 36°C almost bearable.

The building is a great timber and glass thing with shipping containers stacked into it and a staircase running up the outside, and the whole yard in front is cobbled and filled with picnic tables under strings of festoon lights. At half past eight in July, with the sun coming in flat under the awnings, it looks considerably better than it has any right to.

This whole stretch of the river used to work for a living. Nantes built ships here — the yards ran along the Loire, and Chantenay was where the people who worked in them lived. Then the yards shut, and a city that had spent centuries facing the water was left with several kilometres of riverfront it had no use for.

What’s happened since is the sort of thing that goes badly more often than it goes well. Old industrial buildings get gutted, given exposed brick and a neon sign, and end up feeling like a set. This doesn’t. The brewery is in a shed, and it still reads as a shed. The containers are containers. The cobbles are the ones that were already there. Nobody has smoothed it over, and the cranes are still standing a few hundred metres downstream instead of being cut up for scrap, which tells you the city decided at some point that the industrial past was worth keeping in view rather than tidying away.

Whether the people drinking here on a Friday evening think about any of that, I couldn’t say. Probably not. But they’re sitting in a working-class dock quarter drinking craft beer at €6.50 a pint, and both halves of that sentence are true at once, and that’s regeneration for you.

I actually have a 5% lager instead of my usual 5% Guinness. €6.50 a pint. A 0% option is a 33cl and €4.80. So, as much as any Yorkshireman worth his salt, I opted for the cheaper option. Saving €1.50, but having to take part in the demon drink. Ah well. One pint can’t hurt.

The board above the bar has the lot chalked up — an Imperial Stout at 5.9, a session IPA at 4.0 — and I photographed it, partly for the light coming through the big window behind, partly so that when I complain about the prices in six months I’ll have the evidence.

It’s all very French despite one of the brewers being as Dublin as they come. Hi Sean.

I have 12 shots to take on my second film of the day. I’m trying to decide whether or not to use them up here. The music is France Gall and it’s doing my head in. Back to photography, I think.

Nice pint though.

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On the way home I went through the west of Nantes and stopped off to take a last few photos of the port, then cranes and the bridge over the Loire.

They stand on the quay with their jibs up at the same angle, like something that has been paused rather than retired, and the Pont de Cheviré runs straight across behind them. The last frames of the roll went on those. Black and white suits them. They were built for a working river and the river has moved on, and they have the decency not to make a fuss about it.

There was a white hard hat lying in the grass by the fence. I have no idea how long it had been there.

It had been a good day.

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Canon AE1 Program. Two films: the tail of the HP5+ from the day before, then a roll of Fomapan, both at 100 ASA and both in Rodinal. The Fomapan came out of the tank this morning and it is, I have to say, not bad at all.