# Five Bordeaux Gutters and Railings Ranked by Cosima Ferrant's Lost Umbrellas

Over twelve years Cosima Ferrant has learned which corners of Bordeaux keep what the rain takes from people. Here are the five best, by count.

By Karin Hellberg-Yusuf · 2026-11-02 · Art · Bordeaux

Cosima Ferrant is crouched at a drainpipe on Rue Notre-Dame with a torch in her mouth. It is eleven in the morning. The sky is the colour of a sink. She takes the torch out and says the pipe is having a quiet year.

She keeps a tally in a school exercise book with a red cover. It goes back to 2014. She reads from it standing on the pavement while a man in a mustard raincoat steps round her without looking down. Her studio above the shuttered tobacconist in Chartrons now holds 2,304 umbrellas. Only 311 have gone home.

Here is the ranking, from the least generous spot to the most.

5. The drainpipe bracket, Rue Notre-Dame. 58 umbrellas. People hook a handle over it to free both hands for a key or a baguette, and then the bus comes. Cosima likes it for the small ones, the folding kind with a broken rib. 'They were hung up with such confidence,' she says.

4. The iron railing at the top of the Quai des Chartrons steps. 74 umbrellas. People tend to leave them here after a long look at the river. She thinks the umbrella gets set down so a hand can point at something, and the something is more interesting.

3. The gutter outside a closed bakery on Rue Judaïque. 97 umbrellas. Wedged in the gutter with the leaves, usually open and facing the wrong way. A wind did that, not a person. She finds these the saddest, and says so, and then says she is allowed to.

2. The park gate railings, Jardin Public. 133 umbrellas. Bright ones, mostly. Children's colours, bought by adults who thought it would help. She is careful with these. She photographs each against the same grey wall, then dries it with a tea towel.

1. The quay railing by the river benches. 188 umbrellas. It is twelve metres from where number 0417 was found on 14 October 2017: bottle green, wooden handle, folded and strapped on a bench as if someone had put it to bed. Nobody has come for it in nine years. She keeps it nearest the door.

Her print of 0417 hangs on the studio's whitewashed wall. It is a pigment print, 60 by 90 centimetres, pinned at the corners without a frame. The green umbrella lies along pale grey bench slats, the strap a faded orange cord, the wood of the handle dark with damp. A crease from when the print was rolled runs across the lower left. She has not ironed it out. 'It was folded once already,' she says.

Asked what she carries when it rains, she says a hood. She owns no umbrella. Of the 1,993 waiting in the studio, none are hers, and borrowing one, she says, would be theft.

Source: https://oddy.one/a/2026-11-02-five-bordeaux-gutters-and-railings-ranked-by-cosima-ferrant-s-lost-umbrellas/