Tucked into the northwest of the city in the 17th arrondissement, Batignolles feels less like a Paris neighbourhood than a self-contained provincial town that the city grew around. It was an independent village until 1860, and it still has the air of one: a leafy central square, a domed parish church on a quiet place, a covered market, and streets of low buildings full of young families, bakeries, and unhurried café terraces.
There is almost nothing here for the monument-ticking tourist, which is precisely the point. The pleasures are local and low-key — a morning at the organic market, an hour in the Square des Batignolles or the larger Martin Luther King park built over former rail yards to the north, a wander down the flower-lined Cité des Fleurs. It is one of the best places in Paris to see how Parisians actually live.