For many visitors to Paris, the first glimpse of the city is the gloriously scruffy transport interchange at Chatelet Les Halles. For those living in the city, it is an almost unavoidable hub, welcoming 750,000 passengers a day. Creaking, crumbling, peeling and slowly falling apart, it somehow still manages to be efficient.

Welcome to the underground – the deep underground. The principal Metro and RER interchange is a submerged network of platforms and tunnels which itself sits underneath an underground shopping centre. This is the largest underground train station in the world, positioned beneath the largest underground shopping centre in the world.

Laying deep beneath the surface of the city, it is unsurprising to find a lack of natural light. It is a city of hundreds of thousands of fluorescent lamps and yet it remains brightly polychrome. This is a child of the 1970s, a creation from a time when colour was considered an essential element. The colours are codes if only we could follow them, but in today’s monochrome world we’ve forgotten how they work. Soon the whole system will be renovated and the colours will go; the red benches, the blue tiles, the yellow walls. In their place will come the standard, uniform aseptic white environment.

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