The Lost Village 30 Minutes Outside Paris

hello and bonjour it is march 2021 and we are back for another episode of tim travels as little as possible for obvious reasons so today we're just going on a mini adventure half an hour outside paris and because we're also trying to avoid crowds at the moment i thought where better to go than somewhere i've heard rumors about that has apparently been deserted since the 1970s which is why today we're exploring a ghost town welcome this is the old village of gusanville and in many ways it's a typical quaint french countryside village there's a lovely old church there's the local bar and there's even a small chateau but you may have spotted there is something not quite right here something's missing as recently as the 1960s this was a lively community home to over a thousand people but since then the population has dropped dramatically and nowadays only a few hundred inhabitants remain leaving streets like this one almost completely deserted i say almost it's obviously not totally a ghost town there's still a few people who live here you've got these cars here there's someone doing some work over there by the sounds of it and i'm about to get run over so there's still traffic going through here [Applause] but um most of the residents uh have left this terrace is a typical example one house is still occupied while the rest of the row is empty clearly the people at number seven are made of stronger stuff either that or their worst neighbors than kim jong-un but hang on we're half an hour outside paris with a direct railway connection why did a place like this end up getting deserted and if so many people left then why did some people stay well to try and answer the first question about why people left let's have a quick look at google earth so here's where we are in the old village of gusanville a once vibrant community which mysteriously began to disappear in the early 1970s now keep your eyes focused on the right hand side of the screen and if you look closely as we gradually zoom out you might just be able to make out paris charles de gaulle international airport which opened in 1974. the villagers found themselves directly in line with the new runway great news for the local plane spotting community but pretty terrible for everyone else so let's go back to 1973 a year before the airport opens in order to make things slightly less terrible for the residents the french government passes a law that forces the airport's developers to make a generous offer on every house in the village in order to purchase them and then demolish them and whatever else you think about it financially it is a good offer homeowners could sell their property at up to twice the market value and move to somewhere that isn't about to have aircraft flying over it if any of them were hesitating well that summer tragically there's a major crash at the paris air show with the plane coming down on houses less than two kilometers away it's not hard to see why a lot of residents just sold up and got out by the end of the year errol de paris had bought somewhere between 100 and 150 houses and all they needed to do now was demolish them so um why are they still here well there was a problem a large historic church-shaped problem the church dates back to the 12th century or at least parts of it do and it's a classified historic monument which means it cannot be demolished but it turns out that also means you can't demolish anything within 500 meters of it and so the houses were saved sort of after going around in circles between the heritage authorities who refused to allow demolition and the local authorities who refused to allow redevelopment no the new owners had little choice but to board up the windows and then do absolutely nothing for 35 years from that point goosanville was effectively frozen in time among all the empty and deserted buildings the few hundred remaining residents carried on as best they could but the life of the village had gone the church was locked up the bar took final orders for a final time and the chateau was still occupied for a few years but in 1983 that went too today the only place that's still open is one heroic but rather lonely bookshop so is there any hope for gousam veal well yes actually there is with advances in aircraft technology planes these days are quieter or at least less noisy than they were in the 1970s and in 2009 the local authorities finally softened their stance on redevelopment and the town bought back the empty buildings for the price of one symbolic euro there's a bit of tidying up to do still but people are gradually coming back to live here the church has been restored and reopened and look what i found on the high street what luckily it's closed at the moment or i'd probably still be there now so perhaps one day this will become a nice typical quaint french countryside village once again but if you like the abandoned apocalyptic vibe and let's face it if you clicked on this video there's a strong chance that's you don't worry i think it is gonna take a while if you'd like to see gusanville before it becomes nice again or if you really like fixer-upper projects it's a half-hour ride on line d from paris guard you know the train will drop you in the modern part of town it's only a one kilometer walk to the old village but you may want to get a taxi because these pavements are useless to anyone in a wheelchair having said that once you're in the village you can get about on the streets they're pretty flat and not too busy if you want to explore inside the buildings obviously you can do that at your own risk but do make sure it's not one of the inhabited ones as always thanks for watching and i will see you soon you

Channel: The Tim Traveller

Views: 372,029

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Id: DD_AK9_b8bA

Length: 6min 37sec (397 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021