AMB Cote d'Azur

The place, the village square, is where everything is. It is surrounded by the shops, the cafes, La Poste if there still is one, and it is probably overlooked by the mairie and church as well. The place is for everything and everything is there.

Of course, in English, a place is just somewhere. Unless you define it – Jim’s place, Waterloo Place, your seat at the dining table, indicated by your place-mat – it is nowhere in particular. A French place, on the other hand, is much more positive, because generally there aren’t that many of them. In a village where we once lived, the main square wasn’t a place at all but, like a lot of others, was called the cours Gambetta, though far less majestic than, say, the cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence, home of the famous bistro, Les Deux Garcons – who were waiters, of course, rather than two of the lads. There was also a place named after a martyr of the Resistance, though it was known universally as la place neuve. Similarly in my present town, the place Carami, named after the river that runs nearby, is rarely and for obvious reasons called anything but the place de la Mairie.

While British squares mostly mean what they say, even though some might more accurately be described as oblongs, a French place can be just about any shape. The idea of a village square seems to have become transformed into something more like an English place, except that it is more specific and important, as a point of central focus.

Some French towns also have squares, which only adds to the potential confusion. Technically, a square is a public garden, but this doesn’t always follow. We have one locally, made up of an elongated triangle of roads, which only recently has had a modest public garden. For years before then the same space was occupied by a bus station of singular hideousness. It would be nice to think that its replacement with the odd tree and a few shrubs was prompted by a renewed realisation that a square really needed something of the sort to justify its title.

When you start to compare a British town plan with a French carte de la ville, the lack of true equivalents becomes more apparent. The French rue is often translated as road, although it normally (but not, of course, invariably) means street, a thoroughfare with houses. An English road runs between one town or village and another, even though the spreading out of towns will often find a London Road still slap in the centre. There is perhaps more logic to the French route, as in, say, the route de Bordeaux, which at least says where it is going. Then again the English street predates urbanisation: think of old Roman roads like Watling Street.

History continues to play its part in such namings. Many streets in French towns are named for the dates of their Second World War liberation, and many more for major figures. The many cours Gambettas (cours, incidentally, meaning vaguely a walk), commemorate the man who proclaimed a republic after the fall of Napoleon III. In Britain, streets and housing developments are often named after local worthies, and we also saw in recent years a flurry of namings for international figures like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King – though some earlier streets named after Stalin and others have subsequently been renamed.

One of the more interesting street-namings in London dates from the 17th century when the estate of the second Duke of Buckingham was redeveloped. The property, just to the east of today’s Charing Cross Station, stretched from the Strand all the way down to its own watergate on the Thames. Part of the deal was that the streets would reflect the full title of its former owner: George Viliers, Duke of Buckingham. George Street, Villiers Street, Duke Street and Buckingham Street are there to this day, though, understandably, Of Alley has not survived under that name.

Both French and English towns have avenues, though it is not always appreciated that the term was originally French – something that worries the British less than the reverse process does the Academie Française. Strictly speaking, it means a tree-lined street but the likes of, say, Shaftesbury Avenue in London are a good deal less leafy than many more modest plane-shaded ones in France.

The very grandest of French avenues, like those laid out by Baron Haussmann when he redesigned Paris in the 19th century, proudly bear the title of boulevard. It is one term that has not caught on in Britain, although some of Nash’s London innovations, like Regent Street, the previous century, come at least close to the idea. Strangely, America has shown no such reluctance, as witness Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard.

It is surely not just the difference in language that makes these French terms so much more evocative than their English counterparts. An English square can range from the grandeur of Trafalgar to one of those tiny fenced-in patches of grass and shrubbery to which only the surrounding residents have keys. But a French place, whether metropolitan or in a village, will always conjure up not just an ambience but a whole life-style, of leisurely drinks enjoyed in the shade of ancient plane-trees, with a soundtrack of clinking, from boules and glasses alike.

This article first appeared in The Connexion in May 2007.