The Avenue de Champagne

The Avenue de Champagne is one street doing the work of a whole town. It runs roughly east to west for about a kilometre, and both sides are lined with the mansions, gatehouses and offices the champagne houses built for themselves in the nineteenth century — brick and pale stone, gravel courtyards, iron gates with gilded initials, hedges cut to the centimetre, the occasional turret or glasshouse.

Work the line. Standing in the middle of the roadway and shooting along it gives converging railings, plane trees and lamp posts with a mansion closing each side; stepping to a gate and shooting through the ironwork gives a frame inside a frame. The neo-Renaissance Château Perrier, now the champagne museum, anchors the western end; the de Castellane tower stands over the eastern one. Morning light runs cleanly down the street and evening rakes the facades — both work, and neither is crowded, because Épernay is a working town rather than a tourist one.

What you cannot see is the reason the avenue exists: roughly a hundred kilometres of galleries cut into the chalk beneath it, at a steady ten degrees. They belong to the houses, not to the street.

The avenue itself is a public road with pavements on both sides, so photographing it needs nobody's permission. Everything behind the gates is private property. Traffic is light but real — it is still a through route — so keep an eye out when working from the middle of the road.