Bordeaux is the world’s most exquisite, most expensive wine. Bordeaux is, too, a peerlessly elegant city. It possesses: an exceptionally long and homogenous waterfront which curves panoramically through more than 90 degrees; a labyrinthine network of medieval streets; startlingly magnificent eighteenth-century classical set-pieces which dwarf those of Edinburgh, Bath and Nancy; a sort of haughty grandeur which has caused it to gain in the rest of France a reputation for glacial snobbery – a reputation which is not undeserved. It is further south than both Turin and Venice, yet its grand boulevards and squares hardly acknowledge its latitude or its climate. ‘As wet as Nantes, as hot as Seville,’ said Alfred de Vigny. Victor Hugo sort of complemented him: ‘Mix Versailles with Antwerp and you get Bordeaux.’ Architecturally it identifies itself with Paris, it looks north, it pretends to be elsewhere. At least central Bordeaux does – the Bordeaux of gothic rather than romanesque churches, of the Intendant Tourny’s Enlightenment planning, of Victor Louis’ theatre (which officiousjobsworths shoo you out of), of the fantastical monuments to the Girondins, of postcards and brochures advertising its status as a World Heritage site.
There is every possibility that many of the agglomeration’s one million inhabitants have never heard of, let alone tasted, Cheval Blanc or Petrus and make do with 1.80 euro per litre vin en vrac. Equally, quite a few of them do not live in austerely handsome terraced streets of mansions whose every room is the size of a ballroom. Many live or, till a generation or so ago, lived in a building type which is peculiar to Bordeaux and whose profusion lends the inner suburbs their singular complexion.
Without its 12,000 échoppes Bordeaux would still be a remarkable city. With them it is urbanistically unique. The word l’échoppe widely signified a workshop or studio to which were attached living quarters. In Bordeaux, from the middle years of the nineteenth century, it was adopted to describe a building created exclusively as a dwelling. Typically, l’échoppe appears single-storeyed. Some indeed are, whilst others have a semi-basement and floor above. They are flat fronted. Some have two bays, more usually there is only one – the width of each is apparently standardised. They invariably adhere to the building line. Thus an échoppe of 1870 with naturalistic decoration on the keystone and around the door and windows sits comfortably beside its neighbour from the era of art deco – after which they ceased to be built. (In recent years many have been stripped out and ingeniously remade). Bordeaux is predominantly flat. Streets of échoppes, 1000 metres long, narrow to a vanishing point. I have never seen a cityscape like it anywhere else. And I doubt that there is anywhere else which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the epoch of rookeries, tenements and grim back-to-backs hastily jerrybuilt to provide for the rural diaspora – devised such humanely ingenious popular housing without resorting to the extra-urban, proto-sprawl remedies of the garden cities.
Beyond the confluence of the Garonne and the Dordogne, the two opaque biscuit-colour rivers form the longest estuary in Europe, whose waters contain sturgeon, shad, lampreys, eels, elvers and the underrated, undervalued plaice. The French word for plaice is carrelet. It gives its name to a type of fishing hut, built on sturdy piloti with a retractable net; a sort of static trawler. Way upstream, still opaque and biscuit-coloured, in Bordeaux’s suburbs they are reproduced in miniature. If les échoppes belong to a formal vernacular, les cabanons are renegades, parlous structures on hopelessly slender piloti, bodged by bricoleurs who, despite appearances, evidently know what they’re doing: they rarely fall down even though the river is subject to a bore (albeit on a lesser scale than the Severn’s).
When I first knew this city, in the 1960s, it was so grubby that it was routinely referred to as la ville noire. No longer. I was tempted to write: no longer, alas. An energetic programme of stone cleaning has certainly beautified it, but has also swept away the appealingly toxic seediness which characterised so much of the place. The entire agglomeration has got Design in a big way. Le Corbusier’s houses at Pessac have all been restored and the children who live there learn the five points of architecture before they go to school. Edmond Lay’s uncompromisingly brutalist Caisse d’Epargne is reverently restored rather than being torn down to placate philistines. Slinky trams glide through the streets. Though Rogers, Koolhaas, Fuksas and Nouvel have done some of their finest work in and around the city, it is the quantity and quality of the work of architects based here that is persistently impressive: Bernard Bühler, Luc Arsène-Henry and Alain Triaud, Jean-Philippe Lanoire and Sophie Courrian.

Jonathan Meades is a writer and broadcaster on food, architecture and culture, nine of whose television programmes are available on dvd as the Jonathan Meades Collection from 29 September.

AT191/September 08 p96.