Les Goudes

This guide to Les Goudes in Marseille starts with an 1875 railway plan, five stops of track meant to link the city center all the way out to this fishing hamlet, and asks why none of it was ever built. It traces the story back to 1854, when a lead factory opened here precisely because so few people lived nearby to object to the fumes, and how the settlement's fortunes rode on that industry through its early years. Along the way it explains the local phrase Marseillais still use for this dead-end corner of the coast.