For the past couple of years Boulevard Ornano in Paris’s 18th arrondissement has been mostly known for its hipster beer garden, La Recyclerie. Perched above the long-quiet rails of the Petite Ceinture – an abandoned circular railway built more than 150 years ago in the centre of Paris – it offers a cafe, stalls and gardening workshops to its mostly gentrified clientele.

But a few hundred metres away, hidden behind a large metro ticket booth, a camp has taken shape. The 19-mile belt of Petite Ceinture has been derelict for several decades and its possible redevelopment has long sparked debate among environmentalists and entrepreneurs. Then, shortly after the migrant crisis hit Europe, the squatter’s camp took root. “I know there is a Roma camp just a few minutes walk from La Recyclerie, I think it is just straight down the rails,” says one of the cafe’s bartenders, “but I’ve never been there, nor said hello.”

With shacks made from wooden boards and sheets of plastic, and with numerous pans covering holes in case of rain, this 500-metre section of track is home to an estimated 350 people. The infrastructure is nonexistent: there is no electricity and no running water. Camp residents must make the walk to the municipal showers at Porte de Saint-Ouen, almost a mile away.

Sami, a 17-year-old resident of the Petite Ceinture camp. Photograph: Annabelle Azadé

Many camp residents are Roma from Romania or Bulgaria, but as Philippe Gossens at the Ligues des Droits de l’Homme (League of Human Rights) explains, refugees from the Middle East also live here, after fleeing their homes and making their journey to Europe over the summer.

The infrastructure is nonexistent: there is no electricity and no running water

It is hard to find anyone who speaks French, but 17-year-old Sami, from Romania, is fluent. He tells me he has been living in France for three years but has never been to school here. He scrapes by begging for money at the nearby Porte de Clignancourt metro station, with an 18-year-old friend who must make enough to support himself and his three children. Before moving to the camp at the Petite Ceinture, Sami lived at a much larger camp in the northern suburb of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, which was broken up by police in 2014.

“We all applied for social housing,” says Sami, “but we have heard nothing. About five people live in each cabin, an area of about 10m2. It is not an acceptable situation.”

Elvis prepares to make the trip back to Romania. Photograph: Annabelle Azadé

I meet Elvis, a smiling construction worker who lives in another Roma camp in Paris, as he visits friends and family to collect Christmas gifts to take back to Romania. He chats and smokes as he stands by his Bulgarian-registered people carrier, while three men make round trips up and down the wooden stairs from the camp to the car, laden with objects wrapped in plastic bags and brown tape. Elvis and his friends found most of the presents on the street. “You see that television in my trunk?” he asks. “This would cost roughly €70 in Romania, and I got it here for free around the corner!”

While Elvis is going back to Romania to celebrate Christmas, many people in this makeshift camp have a pretty grim new year to look forward to. Whether they come from the Middle East or Eastern Europe, they all travelled to France to look for a better future, and most of them are disappointed. They say the summer migrant crisis generated widespread media coverage but did not in the end trigger the financial help they hoped for from the government.

According to French law, anyone who trespasses on the Petite Ceinture is subject to a €3,750 fine and six months in prison – but the Reseau Ferre de France (the French Railway Network), which owns the abandoned railway, has so far kept silent on the camp and its future. In the first few months of 2015, though, French authorities destroyed 37 squatter camps and displaced more than 4,000 people, according to the Ligues des Droits de l’Homme (the League of Human Rights).

Gossens adds: “There have been cases of tuberculosis in the camp so we decided to test everybody here. The results will be available in mid-January and so we have a bit of time to relocate about a hundred families, but people keep on coming …”

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