The Destruction of Paris: Four Films, One City, and Why It Must Be Saved
13 hours ago
16 min read
Paris is a city I love. I have spent more time there than in almost any capital outside London, and I keep going back. That is exactly why this is the hardest post I have written. Over the past two years I have made four films in and around Paris that the tourist boards would rather you did not watch. This post brings them together, in order, with what I saw and what I believe it means.
Let me be clear at the outset about what this is. It is my opinion and my commentary, built from my own footage and my own words on camera. Where I give a hard number, I link to where it comes from. Where I give a view, it is mine, and you are free to disagree in the comments. I am criticising policies, politicians and ideologies. I am not attacking anyone for being poor, foreign or looking for a better life.
The argument, in short, is this. In my view Paris is two cities on one map. One is the postcard: the Seine at dusk, limestone, cafés and the Louvre. The other starts the moment you step out of the Gare du Nord. I believe the second city is being allowed to grow by politicians who will not say no, egged on by a far-left street politics that treats borders as a crime. I also believe parts of Paris now work as a depot for people heading on to Britain. And I believe Paris must be preserved, as French, for the generations who have not yet seen it.
Film one: The Intentional Destruction of Paris — Next Stop England
The lead film is the newest and the longest, about 44 minutes. I start in the 10th arrondissement, walk from Louis Blanc towards Stalingrad, go back to the Gare du Nord and Château Rouge, and then take the train north through Amiens to Calais. Watch it before you read on; everything below hangs off it.
I open with a line I stand by: “Paris is a city I spend a lot of time in, and it's a city I love immensely.” Many travel creators show you the Emily in Paris version and stop there. I think that is a disservice to the people who live there and to the visitors who arrive with no idea what is around the corner. It is because I love Paris that I find myself dismayed at what is happening to it.
Two cities that occupy the same map
The phrase I keep coming back to in the film is that Paris is two cities that occupy the same map. One is sold to the world as the capital of the civilisation that gave us the rights of man, the metric system, and the idea that a street could be beautiful as well as useful. The other city is not out in some distant banlieue. It is right at the front door, around the station that receives the Eurostar.
For a British visitor that matters. The Gare du Nord is where a huge number of us first set foot in France. The first impression of Paris for thousands of families, students and couples every week is the forecourt and the streets around it. In my view a capital that cannot keep its principal railway station in decent order has already told you what it is prepared to tolerate.
Gare du Nord: the front door of the capital
Outside the station I describe what anyone with eyes can see: men who are not waiting for a train, counterfeit cigarettes, pickpockets working the concourse, and a crowd that has learned not to make a scene. I filmed with a GoPro clipped to my chest, and you can hear people saying “camera, camera”. I don't think honest traders worry about cameras.
Then there is the smell. I was a five-minute walk from the Eurostar terminal, and this is what I said on camera: “It is vile. It is absolutely vile what European leaders have allowed to happen to European cities.” Urine on the stairwells, rotting food and wet cardboard. I am not blaming any one group for that. I am blaming city and national governments that have stopped defending the public realm. A doorway becomes a toilet when there is no consequence for making it one.
And yet, when I walk into the centre, the mood changes. As I put it in the film: “Right in the centre, there are some beautiful parts of Paris. Paris is a wonderful city. It's just unfortunately, our corrupt leaders are allowing parts of Paris to change beyond recognition.”
Château Rouge and the Goutte d'Or
A few hundred metres north you reach Barbès, Château Rouge and the Goutte d'Or. I have written about this neighbourhood before, in Paris Château Rouge: The Neighbourhood That Feels Like Another World, and I went back for this film to see whether anything had changed in a year.
Here I want to be precise, because I was precise in the film. I said: “Commerce is not an occupation. A man selling plantain is not a dealer outside the Gare du Nord.” The market traders of Château Rouge are working. Selling food is not the collapse of a civilisation. My point is a different one, and it is simpler: this does not feel like France. The shop fronts, the language on the street and the goods on the stalls all belong somewhere else. You can call that richness if you wish. I think a visitor is entitled to notice it, and a Parisian is entitled to ask whether anyone voted for it.
In my view the Republic used to have an answer to this: one law, one language, one public square. The answer now, too often, is to call the question indecent. People who remember what the square used to be are told that their memory is the problem.
The camp under Line 2
Follow the elevated Métro between Stalingrad and La Chapelle and you reach the encampment Paris still tolerates under Line 2: tents, trolleys, sofas that will never go back indoors, portable toilets and no running water. The charities that work there describe the same conditions year after year. Whatever you think about migration, nobody should defend people sleeping like that in the capital of one of the richest countries on earth.
What struck me is the pattern. The police clear the smaller camps, and the people move to the one place that has been allowed to become semi-permanent. The problem is shifted, not solved, and it always comes back. I call it a holding pattern in the film: large enough that it cannot be ignored, small enough not to force a political reckoning, and mobile enough that the next step is north.
I spoke to one young man there. I asked him why he wanted to come to England. His answer, in broken English, was that in France he had no home and that in England they would give him a house and money. I don't hold that against him. As I say in the film, “I do not hate the men under this metro… Blaming them for walking through an open gate is a way of avoiding the people who took the lock off.” The responsibility belongs to the people who designed the gate.
Hammer and sickle on the walls
Now to what I believe is the political engine of all this. Walk the 10th, 18th and 19th arrondissements and look at the walls. Not the tags; the politics. The hammer and sickle, papiers pour tous (papers for all), calls to regularise the sans-papiers, posters from the Parti Communiste Français, Lutte Ouvrière and the NPA, and the student unions all saying the same thing in different typefaces. These are not my inventions. They are printed and posted in the open.
In the film I stop at a folding table where a woman is recruiting for a communist group. She told me she was English. I lose my temper a little, and I will own that. What I said, more or less, is that communism killed tens of millions of people in the twentieth century and that I find it disgusting to see it sold to young, impressionable people on the streets of Paris. She asked how many people die under capitalism. I told her the people she was recruiting were far better off under it. You can watch the whole exchange and judge for yourself.
In my view, this is a far-left takeover of the street politics of north-east Paris. Not a coup with tanks, but something quieter. One side may organise, occupy, leaflet the camps and fill the walls. The other side, the side that says a nation is allowed to choose who enters it, finds its meetings cancelled and is called fascist. I think that is not a balance. It is a monopoly, and the people of Paris are poorer for it.
I was careful to make one more distinction, and I will repeat it here: “Some of the people working in these camps are doing what they believe is basic decency. Food, a blanket, a doctor for a child. I'm not going to pretend every volunteer is a conspirator.” My criticism is of the ideology that treats the border itself as the enemy, and of the organisations whose practical effect, in my view, is to keep people moving along the route towards the English coast.
Paris as a depot: the train to Calais
This is the part of the film that will most upset people, and it is the part I am most sure of, because I saw it with my own eyes, more than once. From the Gare du Nord I took the train north. I bought a ticket. On the leg to Amiens, nobody checked it. On the leg from Amiens to Calais there was a ticket inspector on the train, and he still did not check a single ticket. I asked him why. He was not keen to discuss it.
I had seen the same thing on an earlier trip, which I filmed at the time. Groups of men got on at the Gare du Nord, looked round for staff, and rode to the coast. I am not claiming to know what orders were given to whom. I am telling you what I have seen on two separate journeys. In my view, this is why I call Paris a depot. The phrase in the film is: “They are not applying for asylum in France and waiting. They are in transit. Paris is a depot.”
And so to Calais, the last French town before England. I stood under the statue of Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill, inaugurated in 2017, which commemorates the defence of Calais in 1940 and the evacuation at Dunkirk. It was a strange place to reflect on what I had just seen. In my view the French state finds it convenient to pass the problem on to Britain, and Britain, outside the EU, has made itself an easy place to pass it to. As I said on camera, it is like a neighbour who chucks their rubbish over the fence into your garden.
The Channel in numbers
Here are the figures, from the UK government's own statistics rather than from me. According to the Home Office's immigration statistics for the year ending December 2025, 41,472 people arrived in the UK on small boats in 2025. That was 13% more than in 2024, and only 9% fewer than the record 45,774 in 2022. The average boat carried 62 people in 2025, up from 41 in 2022. The same release says 71% of all people detected arriving by illegal routes since 2018 were adult men.
It has not stopped. The Home Office's small boat arrivals page for the last seven days records 1,343 people arriving in 17 boats between 29 September and 5 October 2026. That includes 609 people on 5 October alone. Those are provisional figures, and the government says they may change.
I quote these numbers because they are official, not because I think a number tells the whole story. Behind each one there is a dinghy launched from a French beach, often by smuggling gangs who profit from every crossing, and a journey that, in my view, too often began with an unchecked ticket from the Gare du Nord.
Who I blame, and who I don't
I want to be fair about where I point the finger. I do not blame the people of Calais, who have lived with this longer than anyone. I do not blame the stall holders of Château Rouge. I do not blame France, the France that still sets a table, argues in a café and knows the names of its villages. I have spent years filming that France and I love it.
I blame the officials who treat the capital as a sorting office. I blame the national governments in Paris and London who sign one deal after another while the boats keep coming. And I blame the ideology that has made it almost impossible to say any of this out loud without being called a bigot.
In my films I use an old phrase for the people at the top of all this: the NWO. To me it stands for a class of technocrats and globalist politicians who think history has ended and that all that remains is management. In my view they would prefer a Europe of interchangeable residents to a Europe of distinct nations with memories and borders, because the first is easier to run. And in my view the politicians we elect too often behave like their puppets. I can't hand you a membership list, and I won't pretend this is a proven fact. It is my reading of what I see, and I put it to you as that. What I can show you is the evidence on the street, and I have.
There is a line from the Château Rouge film that I think sums up where I stand: “No people on earth deserve to be erased. Not the French, not the Afghans, not the Congolese, not the Tibetans.” The French have as much right to their capital as anyone has to theirs.
Film two: This Is Paris Now — Marché Barbès
The second film, from July 2025, starts at the same front door. I tell viewers who have just come off the Eurostar that the front of the station is the perfect place to get a taxi or an Uber. Then I go round the back and walk north into the Sunday market under the Line 2 viaduct at Barbès.
The market itself is a lesson in two economies. The traders along the sides have paid for licences, are happy to be filmed and pay their way. The sellers in the middle, with goods laid on boxes and blankets, don't have licences and don't want a camera anywhere near them. As I said on the day, “from a perspective, they got to start somewhere. But at the same time, they're undercutting legitimate people.” The cost of clearing up afterwards falls on the city and on the honest traders. In my view, that is a failure of enforcement, not of the people trying to make a living.
I also met a man born in Paris of Algerian heritage who stopped to chat, warned me about pickpockets and told me about his brother in Leyton. It was a warm moment, and I left it in the film because it matters. My argument has never been with individuals like him. It is with the policies that, in my view, have turned parts of the city into zones that the state no longer polices and that the French were never asked about. The question I put in the film is: “Did the French really choose this?”
And I close that film with a line I still believe: “Europe is great when the doors are ajar, not flung wide open.” A Europe that welcomes people who come to work, adopt its ways and contribute is a Europe that can last. A Europe that cannot say no to anyone, in my view, will eventually stop being Europe at all.
Film three: Paris Promised Us Romance, with Angela Rose
The third film, also from July 2025, was made with the American political commentator Angela Rose, who came with me through Château Rouge. In it we look back on that walk and I go back to the neighbourhood on my own.
Angela's reaction is worth hearing because she came to it fresh. She told me her heart was racing, that she was frightened at moments because of how close and crowded it was, and that what really worried her was how quickly the people around us agreed that nobody wanted to be recorded. Her takeaway on migration was a simple one, and I think most people would agree with it. She said that if you move to a country because you respect it, assimilation is how you become part of it. Otherwise, what is the point of leaving?
We also met a bar owner who, after some hesitation, told us he felt he was the only French person left on his stretch, and that it was not the same as it used to be. I am not presenting that as a statistic. It is one man's feeling about his own street, and I think it deserves to be heard rather than dismissed.
In the walk-back section I answer the critics of my first Château Rouge video. Some said I was exaggerating, or exploiting poverty. My reply was that I have filmed in slums in Asia and Central America and in the forgotten corners of the Balkans, and nowhere else outside Western Europe have I seen a once-great capital so willingly abandoned by its own leaders. As I said: “This isn't failure, it's policy.” I also talk about unrefrigerated meat sweating behind fogged glass. We are in the European Union, and food safety laws exist for good reason. Defending that as diversity, in my view, insults Parisians and the migrants who do follow the rules.
Film four: Walking through Versailles, ranting about real issues
The oldest of the four films, from September 2024, is the most personal. It was made after the UK general election, for the many new subscribers who found the channel through my films on migration. I walk through Versailles, west of Paris, talking about politics, and keep interrupting myself because the town is so beautiful.
Most of the rant is about Britain: my view that the Conservatives were conservative in name only, that Labour won on fewer votes than many people realise, and that the cost of living has risen faster than living standards for ordinary people. Those are arguments for another post. What I want to draw out here is what happened when I walked into the Versailles market.
Roast chicken, fruit and vegetables, cheeses, quiche, four-red-fruit jam presented as if it were jewellery. I said on camera that this sort of travel calms me down. And then the line that, for me, is the heart of this whole post: “This is culture, this is heritage, and Europe is throwing it all away by changing itself dramatically too quickly.”
I also noted something we have nearly lost in England. In France independent businesses are still encouraged. Market streets are closed to cars, and the butcher, the cheesemonger and the baker can make a living. At home, too many of our high streets have been handed to a few big chains. And as I said in Versailles, “thank God at least in some parts of France it feels very, very much French.”
Why Paris is worth saving
I don't want to end on the Gare du Nord. I want to end where I started: I love this city. Paris is worth saving not because it is perfect, but because nothing else like it exists. Haussmann's boulevards, the bridges of the Seine, the bookstalls on the quais, the Sainte-Chapelle's glass and the café on the corner where nobody hurries you. All of that was built by a particular people over centuries, and it belongs to their grandchildren as much as to the tourists.
This is the heritage case. A city's buildings can stand for a thousand years, but its spirit lives in the people who inhabit them: the language spoken on the street, the bakery that opens at seven, and the market that has been on the same square since before anyone can remember. If the French lose that, the buildings will stand, the brand will be licensed and sold, and the substance will be gone. I believe Paris has to be preserved as French for future generations, not managed into one more interchangeable global city.
It is also the tourism case. People do not cross the world to see a city that looks like everywhere else. They come for Paris. Every visitor who walks out of the Gare du Nord into a stinking forecourt and never comes back is a loss to the people who run the hotels, the restaurants and the museums. Keeping Paris French, clean and safe is not only a matter of identity. It is also how millions of Parisians earn a living.
If you are planning your first trip, a good Paris guidebook will tell you where the postcard city is. A decent history of Paris will tell you why it is worth fighting for.
Where visitors should still go
None of this should put you off going. It should make you go with your eyes open. Here is where I would still send anyone I love.
The islands and the Left Bank. Start on the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis, cross to the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain, and give the Luxembourg Gardens an afternoon. This is Paris at its most Parisian.
Montmartre, early. Go before the crowds for the steps and the white domes of Sacré-Cœur, then walk down through Abbesses. I filmed the whole route from the basilica to the Moulin Rouge in my Montmartre walk.
The Marais and the great museums. The Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and the Orangerie are as good as anything on earth. Book ahead and go early or late.
Versailles, by train. RER C or a train from Saint-Lazare or Montparnasse takes you there. See the palace, then walk into town for the market I filmed. Pick up a Versailles guide before you go, because the palace is overwhelming without one.
Giverny and Monet's garden. Spend a day out of the city in Normandy, among the water lilies. My guide to visiting Monet's gardens at Giverny from Paris has the practicals, and my ultimate guide to exploring Paris has itineraries for a longer stay.
For guided walks, river cruises and skip-the-line tickets, browse Paris tours and experiences on Viator.
On safety, my practical advice is simple. Arriving on the Eurostar, take a taxi, an Uber or the Métro straight from the front of the Gare du Nord into the centre. Keep your phone in a zipped pocket on the Métro and around the big stations. And choose where you sleep carefully, which brings me to the map.
Where to stay
For a first visit, stay in the 1st to 7th arrondissements, around the Marais (3rd and 4th), or in Saint-Germain (6th). Use the Paris hotels map below (Stay22 Hub, AID thewonderingenglishman) to pick a pin that matches the Paris you came for.
Plan your trip
Airport or station transfer: GetTransfer
eSIM: Roamless with code WONDERING
Hotels: Booking.com
Apartments: Airbnb
Tours and tickets: Viator Paris
Flights
Not coming by Eurostar? Compare fares to Charles de Gaulle, Orly or Beauvais below.
Why it stays with me
I made these four films because the tourist cameras won't. A civilisation that cannot look honestly at its own streets, its own trains or its own coastline is in trouble. Paris is still one of the most beautiful cities on earth, and I want my children's generation to find it that way, and to find it French.
The Wondering Englishman has visited over 90 countries so far, and I'm slowly making my way around the world. Paris is one I will keep going back to, and I will keep filming it honestly. Tell me in the comments of the films whether you think I've got it right.
Photo credits: Facade of Gare de Paris-Nord by Bobo Boom and Château de Versailles, Cour de Marbre by Kipp Jones, both via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0.
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Safe travels, The Wondering Englishman
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