"When I first visited Marseille, I was staying at a hostel near Cours Julien, a square covered in layers of years worth of sun-bleached graffiti, with drunks sharing the space with artists, buskers, a children’s play area and local musicians. When you look at the way the urban sprawl of Marseille has been built up organically by waves of new arrivals and undesirables from all over the world since Phocaean sailors set up base there in 600BCE, often arriving broke at the port and never quite making the 20-minute walk up to the train station to find anywhere else to live, you see that multiculturalism is embedded in the fabric of almost every arrondissement, and especially in the city centre. I sat there on my first day watching these twin sisters wait for the pigeons to settle to eat scraps, then race through them on their skates making the pigeons scatter, and knew right away that I was in a city of simple pleasures. From the first night I laid my head down in Marseille, I was completely intoxicated, and knew I would make it my home – which I have this year."