DELIVERY AT MEYRARGUES : IT'S A HYPER

To make cans by bicycle,

From Meyrargues the laborious, there will soon be no traces left. 

If the cars still run to the bottom of the village, in the area that was once factories and warehouses, passers-by are less numerous. 

Not that this village of 3500 souls is depopulated but rather that the cohorts of hundreds of workers at Barbier-Dauphin, the men employed to unload the trains

have deserted for about ten years.

It was there, however, in the background of the national 96 which goes from Meyrargues to Peyrolles that the buildings of the colossal food cannery were here.

At the standstill since 1987, the seven hectares of the plant have long remained abandoned: in expectation.

Elevators without a cabin

Outside, for the passerby, it was a scary ghost ship with steel contours and broken glasses designated according to "La Provence" (local newspaper) under

the term «sordid wasteland» by Mireille Jouve Mayor of the Municipality of Meyrargues. Inside, everything had been left as at the end of a normal day over 10,000 m².

16-1 no longer responding

A land of imposing lockers were to offer a space of intimacy in the enterprise. Past the changing rooms, the tertiary division is just as vast as the workshops,

its standard vandalized over time, its documents on land, its gaping safe. 

From the office of the director and his terrace contemplate at the end of the garden the joy of the workers who are eating in the canteen of the box.

Further to the right, the laboratory, its test tubes, its benzene beaks, its toxic products but also its cockroaches, its ivy, its glass breaks. 

Leaving the site from above, large cisterns still serve as a landmark compared to the remains of the Barbier-Dauphin Factory now impeccably transformed into

a supermarket under the yoke of the Becker Architect’s Office.

A hyper: it’s Super

Amédée Barbier, who created the Barbier group from the Lambesc factory in 1860, certainly did not foresee such a destiny for one of the group’s flagships. 

It was his son who, together with a «Dauphin», launched the Meyrargues factory in 1929, which was inaugurated in 1935. 

The negotiations to move from a production site to a distribution site have been long and complicated.

It was to the Colgate-Palmovive group that the E Leclerc group had to turn to establish itself. A good added value for this multinational owner of the site since 1960.

Later, at the municipal meetings where the fate of the Gare district was decided, some of them caught fire on internet when the chimney of the building,

37 metres high, was dismantled, evoking “the brainwashing suffered by elected officials”. According to one of the bloggers, “the cloud from Japan”, atmosphere.