The Puces de Saint-Ouen is fifteen separate markets sharing seven hectares, with about seventeen hundred dealers. Two markets two hundred metres apart can sell completely different things. Vernaison is crooked wooden lanes of bric-a-brac. Biron is gilt and glass cases. Serpette sells twentieth-century design out of showrooms. Paul Bert is furniture and industrial pieces under iron roofs. Prices are not marked on most of it, and the dealers expect to be asked. Nothing opens from Tuesday to Friday: the alleys sit behind steel shutters, and a visitor on a Wednesday finds nothing at all.
The market began with the ragpickers, pushed outside the city limit onto this open ground in the 1870s. Buyers came out from Paris because the goods were cheap, and they called the place the flea market after the state of the second-hand furniture. Landowners started renting numbered plots in the 1920s, roofing the lanes and putting up sheds, and the encampment turned into a permanent town of shops. It has called itself the largest antiques market in the world for a century.