Public bathhouse returns to Paris suburb for first time in 20 years
Once considered redundant, public bathhouses are making a return to the suburbs surrounding Paris. Two decades after its last bathhouse closed, the northern suburb of Saint-Denis has opened a new set of municipal showers where anyone can take a wash for free.
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Signs advertising "bains-douches" are a familiar sight on the streets of Paris, where public bathhouses sprang up by the dozen in the days before indoor plumbing came as standard.
But these days, the signs are more likely to mark an art school or cultural centre than a functioning washhouse.
Only 17 bathhouses are still in operation in Paris today, while in the banlieues surrounding the French capital, the last such facilities closed years ago.
Now the sprawling suburb of Saint-Denis, on the northern outskirts of Paris, is reversing the trend. The area recently reopened a municipal bathhouse, its first since 2004.
It comes in response to what local activists say are urgent needs, some of them unexpected.
Fifteen minutes of privacy
"In the bathrooms, the basins, the hairdryers and the mirrors are all shared, but everything else is private," explains Ilaria Ben Amor, director of social assistance at Hôtel Social 93, a local charity involved in the project.
"There are 12 shower cubicles, including one that's accessible to people with reduced mobility. All the cubicles look the same. There's a place to put your things as soon as you go in, with the shower area behind. You can have the cubicle to yourself for 15 to 20 minutes, between 8am and 12pm."
The new bathhouse, open to the public since November, adjoins a homeless shelter in La Plaine, home to the French national stadium and one of the outlying neighbourhoods picked for redevelopment as part of preparations for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
The push to restore public washrooms gathered pace as hundreds of people, most of them migrants, set up camp under a motorway bridge by the stadium in recent years.
While authorities agreed to install temporary water taps, they ripped them out when they dispersed the camp in November 2020.
Local charities and rights groups had been asking for permanent facilities ever since, arguing that access to water is a fundamental human right.
'Helps people feel better'
"The team here is nice," says Salim, a 29 year old who is using the airy white bathrooms for the fourth time. "I got here late but they still let me come in and have a wash."
Today he arrives with his friend Julien, 25. Both men are homeless.
"It feels good to have showered," Julien says. "It helps people feel better, it's a good thing. That way you don't have people stinking on public transport."
But people sleeping rough aren't the only ones expected to use the facility.
"Obviously homeless people are the first you expect to use them, because they don't have anywhere else to shower day to day, except in shelters," says Oriane Filhol, the deputy mayor of Saint-Denis in charge of social services.
"But there are also people living in poor housing – former servants' rooms, tiny places, where they don't necessarily have access to a shower every day."
Only 0.5 percent of primary homes in France do not have a bath or shower, according to 2020 data from national statistics office Insee.
Yet in Saint-Denis, which together with other suburbs of Paris forms the poorest department in mainland France, the figure rises to 8.9 percent – representing several thousand homes without a proper place to wash.
Water poverty
Like most facilities of its kind, the Saint-Denis bathhouse does not collect the names or details of its users.
But a 2019 study provides a snapshot of the people who use Paris's public showers. Of more than a thousand people surveyed, only 35 percent said they lived on the streets.
More than half – 58 percent – had accommodation, whether they lived in their own home (33 percent), stayed with someone else (17 percent) or were lodged in a shelter or hotel (8 percent).
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Yet 67 percent of all respondents, housed or not, reported not having a shower in the place where they usually live.
"We're talking about students, or perhaps old people who live in really old accommodation that hasn't been renovated and where the facilities are in a bad state," says Filhol. "Bathhouses are also for them."
Anecdotal evidence suggests that even more people may be turning to them as the cost of energy rises.
"We see more and more people who don't want to use the water at home," the manager of one bathhouse in the north-east of Paris told RMC radio last February. "At least once a week someone talks about it, while before it never came up."
With electricity prices set to rise again this 1 February – for the fourth time in two years – free hot showers could be a more valuable commodity than ever.
A version of this story in French was reported by Aram Mbengue. The English version was written by Jessica Phelan.
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