gosh, i loved that. What it made me think of was the Francis Lymond books by Dorothy Dunnett, and in particular when the characters had a chase across the roofs of Lyons only a few decades before this time. obviously it would be possible to run across the roofs of London at this time, as depicted.
But then would you be Rufus, rufous, or perhaps fenestral? I’m sure it’s over my head….
Uh-oh, just ‘ad an image of a chimney sweep from Dickensian times. Next I’ll be thinking of nannies with brollies. But is it a parasol (for the sun) or a parapluie (for the rain)? Never mind, I’ll just spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and ‘ave some tea. (Whoa, that *is* in the browser’s spell checker. Who’d have thought?)
That was truly lovely. I can’t even accurately describe the feeling it gave me, as though I was looking through a window into the past, and yet felt all the years since then at the same time. Does anyone know who did the music?
We have to imagine the streets filled with crowds of people, horses, carts, carriages, etc. And a smokey atmosphere. All cooking and heating was done using wood or coal fires. Every house had chimneys, and every chimney was pouring out smoke more often than not. So in a city like London, the air would usually have been smokey. The smells of a city would be overwhelming to us today, but I’m sure that the people of the time would have been used to it, and probably didn’t notice it that much.
One thing that strikes me is how small a space, visually and physically, people lived in. Americans generally live in large spaces with minimal texture. The older living spaces in Europe are smaller, but more textured, and the more cramped, the more textured. We live with rigidly level surfaces, fewer curves, and abundant right angles, which were only known in the public buildings of Greece, its inheritor Rome, and before them in Egypt, Akkad, and Sumer—but only in the public areas. Asia, today known for straight lines and garden spaces, was actually less so in its castles and temples, and previous centuries in China, particularly, produced neighborhoods that sometimes had exits that ran through other structures, and were tangled beyond anything in old London. But always—small spaces: high texture. Many of the people who lived in old London lived within what we would call a five block radius much of their lives. Yet they had visual texture equal to a much larger space, on our terms.
It’s certainly more comfortable to live in a small space that’s textured, than one that isn’t. One factor that went along with living in smaller spaces was a huge lack of privacy.
On the other hand, London was very small by modern standards, and there were green fields and open spaces only a short distance outside the city. From anywhere in London you could walk for 20-30 minutes and be in open fields.
Something quite strange happened maybe a dozen years ago, coincidentally about this time of year. I know you’ll believe this is a story, but it’s reporting. I don’t tell people about this because I know they won’t believe me.
I’m an old bachelor. I’m not OCD over housekeeping. This happened after the water district began neutralizing the water supply, and the bluish haze in the sink disappeared. The bathroom sink in my “master suite” said “DELTA” embossed on the top of the pop-up stopper.
About the middle of October I began to notice faint black lines on the pop-up that looked a bit like the start of a pencil sketch. No doubt a bit of mould or algae. I was curious, so I made sure to not touch it. Every day it got a bit bolder.
In a couple weeks it looked very, very much like the left side profile of a modern H sap. skull. (Far better than I could do if I tried!) It was sitting on the lower mandible. The first molar was missing, the second was present. The nose, eye sockets, forehead, crown, and back of the skull were all represented quite clearly. The strange thing was on the forehead, about where the hairline would start, there was a square protrusion. It looked very much like the thing an orthodox Jew would wear while praying at the Wailing Wall, or given the time of year, one might think of the boss on an elk or deer’s skull where the antlers form.
It was reached maximum resolution just about Halloween, after which it slowly faded, disappeared, and never returned.
You think I’m being hypersuggestive, but there’s no one here to suggest anything. Do my other posts here lead you to believe suggestability? Since I’ve Asperger’s, maybe it’s a consequence of that, you think. That’s why I’ve never told anybody about it. Nobody’d believe what happened. Do you?
Back in the day we didn’t have digital cameras. Pics would have meant getting out the 35MM, waiting to fill the rest of the roll of film, sending it in for developing and printing, etc. No, there are no pics.
I dunno, maybe I should just tell it as a piece of “creative writing”, a story for Halloween. 😉
If you read the accompanying article and follow the links, this video is based on an actual historical map, but it only focuses on the area of London around Pudding Lane and shows the bakery where the Great Fire of 1666 started. The Crytek website notes that the DMU team was highly concerned with historical accuracy. This video won the Off The Map competition. Participants in the Off The Map competition were asked to turn actual historic maps from the British Library into realistic and detailed CRYENGINE scenery. The participating teams and universities were allowed to choose one of three different maps as their inspiration: The Pyramids of Giza, Wiltshire’s Stonehenge, or London around the time of the Great Fire in 1666.
Scouring powder? Perhaps you missed the bachelor bit?
Maybe I should have poured some wodka down the drain? 😉 Trouble is, my Kievan/Hungarian ancestors are 20+ generations back! I didn’t know that’s what one did. No family legends.
Eh, Paul, who am I to say? I’m pretty well convinced that our former apartment was haunted by a ghost who left after I offered him Christmas cookies. Yours sounds somewhat less friendly…I’d be really glad it never returned!
No prizes for guessing next month’s avatar!!! 🙂 Guess one of these days I’ll have to bring back Lil Tux out of costume, or maybe use the official one.
Not many would prize this limerick, maybe one or two here.
DOUG ENGELBART
With whiskers it never was graced,
By cats it never was chased,
But we praise the creator
(Who’s just died, decades later)
Of the mouse that can cut and paste.
(Not mine, but David/DJJ, one of the Galaxy Zoo members.)
Rats, the video must be in Flash drive, which IPads don’t play. I’ll look at it later on my regular laptop but it sounds fascinating. CJ and others: I like your comments about texture and crookedness. Much of my “Marginal Way” novel is really a paean to Edinburgh in the 16th C, where I studied (albeit in a much later century) for four years. I’m (rather too) slowly starting its sequel, “The Rough Wooing,” also opening in Edinburgh — I think I will casually emphasis that lack of long, straight lines at some point. I want readers to have a visceral feel for the place and culture and realize it is different than ours today.
Re. inhabitants not traveling far ablock, let alone afield, of their birth place — a casual historical aside in the superb pictorial, Facebook blog Lost Edinburgh by its learned authors mentioned that inhabitants had to pay to leave (or was it reenter?) the cramped burgh in medieval times, so many never left at all. Although I am doing a strongly historically-based fantasy, I think I am going to ignore this inconvenient fact since it would require a fair amount of emphasis and plot changes to the completed novel. But it’s really bugging me: I want fantastic accuracy!
Recollection is a bit vague; doesn’t it have that one long stright road from the castle down toward the harbor. (The Royal Way???) How long has it had that?
Okay, so Real Soon Now they’re going to add a date slider to Google Maps.
gosh, i loved that. What it made me think of was the Francis Lymond books by Dorothy Dunnett, and in particular when the characters had a chase across the roofs of Lyons only a few decades before this time. obviously it would be possible to run across the roofs of London at this time, as depicted.
But then would you be Rufus, rufous, or perhaps fenestral? I’m sure it’s over my head….
Uh-oh, just ‘ad an image of a chimney sweep from Dickensian times. Next I’ll be thinking of nannies with brollies. But is it a parasol (for the sun) or a parapluie (for the rain)? Never mind, I’ll just spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and ‘ave some tea. (Whoa, that *is* in the browser’s spell checker. Who’d have thought?)
That was truly lovely. I can’t even accurately describe the feeling it gave me, as though I was looking through a window into the past, and yet felt all the years since then at the same time. Does anyone know who did the music?
A wonderful video!
We have to imagine the streets filled with crowds of people, horses, carts, carriages, etc. And a smokey atmosphere. All cooking and heating was done using wood or coal fires. Every house had chimneys, and every chimney was pouring out smoke more often than not. So in a city like London, the air would usually have been smokey. The smells of a city would be overwhelming to us today, but I’m sure that the people of the time would have been used to it, and probably didn’t notice it that much.
One thing that strikes me is how small a space, visually and physically, people lived in. Americans generally live in large spaces with minimal texture. The older living spaces in Europe are smaller, but more textured, and the more cramped, the more textured. We live with rigidly level surfaces, fewer curves, and abundant right angles, which were only known in the public buildings of Greece, its inheritor Rome, and before them in Egypt, Akkad, and Sumer—but only in the public areas. Asia, today known for straight lines and garden spaces, was actually less so in its castles and temples, and previous centuries in China, particularly, produced neighborhoods that sometimes had exits that ran through other structures, and were tangled beyond anything in old London. But always—small spaces: high texture. Many of the people who lived in old London lived within what we would call a five block radius much of their lives. Yet they had visual texture equal to a much larger space, on our terms.
I wonder.
It’s certainly more comfortable to live in a small space that’s textured, than one that isn’t. One factor that went along with living in smaller spaces was a huge lack of privacy.
On the other hand, London was very small by modern standards, and there were green fields and open spaces only a short distance outside the city. From anywhere in London you could walk for 20-30 minutes and be in open fields.
See this map of London in 1700.
The video also doesn’t seem to show the main thoroughfares, which were wider and straighter.
Something quite strange happened maybe a dozen years ago, coincidentally about this time of year. I know you’ll believe this is a story, but it’s reporting. I don’t tell people about this because I know they won’t believe me.
I’m an old bachelor. I’m not OCD over housekeeping. This happened after the water district began neutralizing the water supply, and the bluish haze in the sink disappeared. The bathroom sink in my “master suite” said “DELTA” embossed on the top of the pop-up stopper.
About the middle of October I began to notice faint black lines on the pop-up that looked a bit like the start of a pencil sketch. No doubt a bit of mould or algae. I was curious, so I made sure to not touch it. Every day it got a bit bolder.
In a couple weeks it looked very, very much like the left side profile of a modern H sap. skull. (Far better than I could do if I tried!) It was sitting on the lower mandible. The first molar was missing, the second was present. The nose, eye sockets, forehead, crown, and back of the skull were all represented quite clearly. The strange thing was on the forehead, about where the hairline would start, there was a square protrusion. It looked very much like the thing an orthodox Jew would wear while praying at the Wailing Wall, or given the time of year, one might think of the boss on an elk or deer’s skull where the antlers form.
It was reached maximum resolution just about Halloween, after which it slowly faded, disappeared, and never returned.
You think I’m being hypersuggestive, but there’s no one here to suggest anything. Do my other posts here lead you to believe suggestability? Since I’ve Asperger’s, maybe it’s a consequence of that, you think. That’s why I’ve never told anybody about it. Nobody’d believe what happened. Do you?
Pics or it didn’t happen! 😀
Back in the day we didn’t have digital cameras. Pics would have meant getting out the 35MM, waiting to fill the rest of the roll of film, sending it in for developing and printing, etc. No, there are no pics.
I dunno, maybe I should just tell it as a piece of “creative writing”, a story for Halloween. 😉
Oh, yeah, “scanning”, forgot about getting it into digital form.
I believe it. Many stranger things have happened.
If you read the accompanying article and follow the links, this video is based on an actual historical map, but it only focuses on the area of London around Pudding Lane and shows the bakery where the Great Fire of 1666 started. The Crytek website notes that the DMU team was highly concerned with historical accuracy. This video won the Off The Map competition. Participants in the Off The Map competition were asked to turn actual historic maps from the British Library into realistic and detailed CRYENGINE scenery. The participating teams and universities were allowed to choose one of three different maps as their inspiration: The Pyramids of Giza, Wiltshire’s Stonehenge, or London around the time of the Great Fire in 1666.
And now for a more appropriate avatar.
Really weird, Paul. Can’t figure it unless you changed scouring powders…
Love the turkey.
Scouring powder? Perhaps you missed the bachelor bit?
Maybe I should have poured some wodka down the drain? 😉 Trouble is, my Kievan/Hungarian ancestors are 20+ generations back! I didn’t know that’s what one did. No family legends.
Eh, Paul, who am I to say? I’m pretty well convinced that our former apartment was haunted by a ghost who left after I offered him Christmas cookies. Yours sounds somewhat less friendly…I’d be really glad it never returned!
Cute turkey!
No prizes for guessing next month’s avatar!!! 🙂 Guess one of these days I’ll have to bring back Lil Tux out of costume, or maybe use the official one.
Not many would prize this limerick, maybe one or two here.
DOUG ENGELBART
With whiskers it never was graced,
By cats it never was chased,
But we praise the creator
(Who’s just died, decades later)
Of the mouse that can cut and paste.
(Not mine, but David/DJJ, one of the Galaxy Zoo members.)
It was very well received on a couple of the genealogy groups on FB – lots of likes and some nice comments.
‘Tis a fine limerick for a fine invention and inventor. Thanks for posting it, Paul. 🙂
I’m surprised at how clean the streets and walls look.
Rats, the video must be in Flash drive, which IPads don’t play. I’ll look at it later on my regular laptop but it sounds fascinating. CJ and others: I like your comments about texture and crookedness. Much of my “Marginal Way” novel is really a paean to Edinburgh in the 16th C, where I studied (albeit in a much later century) for four years. I’m (rather too) slowly starting its sequel, “The Rough Wooing,” also opening in Edinburgh — I think I will casually emphasis that lack of long, straight lines at some point. I want readers to have a visceral feel for the place and culture and realize it is different than ours today.
Re. inhabitants not traveling far ablock, let alone afield, of their birth place — a casual historical aside in the superb pictorial, Facebook blog Lost Edinburgh by its learned authors mentioned that inhabitants had to pay to leave (or was it reenter?) the cramped burgh in medieval times, so many never left at all. Although I am doing a strongly historically-based fantasy, I think I am going to ignore this inconvenient fact since it would require a fair amount of emphasis and plot changes to the completed novel. But it’s really bugging me: I want fantastic accuracy!
Recollection is a bit vague; doesn’t it have that one long stright road from the castle down toward the harbor. (The Royal Way???) How long has it had that?