planned<\/em>.\u00a0 The streets were laid out in straight lines; coming back from the church to the bus in Stratford we were easily able to just reverse our steps and when John said that the coach was straight down this block, it actually was straight, and the name of the street stayed the same all the way down.\u00a0 Houses were grouped with houses and businesses with businesses.\u00a0 You can see this in my photo from Bath – nice rows of houses on the horizon.\u00a0 Finally, each city seemed to have a unifying theme.\u00a0 In Bath, it is the distinctively colored Bath Stone.\u00a0 In Oxford, it is the many colleges.\u00a0 In Stratford, it is the Tudor architecture and the fact that all the streets, hotels, and pubs are named after something Shakespearean.\u00a0 (You could argue that that last theme is a bit kitsch, but still, it is a theme.)<\/p>\nYou can also see from the pictures that the buildings in Bath are a lot shorter than the buildings in London.\u00a0 In Bath, the tallest feature is a spire, like it used to be in London.\u00a0 In London, the skyscrapers on the horizon, each one striving to be taller than the last, demonstrates the individualistic capitalism and commercialism that has touched this city more than others.\u00a0 Our day trips have reminded me how London truly is the financial and cultural capital of the world, a place which draws people, a place where things always have to be happening.\u00a0 Bath, Oxford and Stratford seem to be less touched by this globalized commercialism.\u00a0 I did spot a Ben and Jerry’s in Bath, but I did not see Starbucks and KFC’s on every corner like we do in London.<\/p>\n
I think that a slower pace of life and a greater appreciation for people goes hand in hand with the softened touch of commercialism in the smaller cities. I think\u00a0 a good example of this contrast is seen by comparing busking in Bath and London.\u00a0 From what I learned from our tour guide in the Bath Abbey, the buskers have their own kind of community.\u00a0 In Bath, you don’t need a license to perform in the streets, but you are only allowed to stay in the same place for one hour before you have to move 50 metres down the street.\u00a0 The buskers regulate this themselves; they form their own queues and rotations for different spots throughout the city.\u00a0 In London, buskers need a license, and they are assigned a specific spot and specific time to perform.\u00a0 It is doubtful that many of them know each other or even cross paths.\u00a0 Furthermore, in Bath, people sit around the squares and actually listen to the busker perform for the entire half hour or hour he is there.\u00a0 In the London Underground, people always hurry right past the performers, barely noticing them. \u00a0\u00a0 In the smaller cities, I felt like there were actually people, as opposed to the anonymous mass we have observed in London.<\/p>\n
Personally, I prefer the smaller towns and cities to London, but they are not without their disadvantages.\u00a0 Obviously, there is not as much diversity to be found in the smaller cites, nor are there are many opportunities for arts and museums as there are in London.<\/p>\n
A problem with the argument I have made in this post is that the three smaller cities we’ve gone to have also been very touristy cities.\u00a0 Although I feel as though the observations I have made are accurate,\u00a0 I recognize that they are limited by the presence of tourists queuing for attractions and buying gifts in gift shops.\u00a0 I am excited to move to Norwich, a less touristy town and one in which we will actually get to participate in the communitiy, to see if my observations hold true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think that some of my favorite activities we\u2019ve done since we\u2019ve been here have been our day trips to Bath, Oxford, and Stratford.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think I could ever live in a city permanently; the crowds, the chaos, the push and shove hustle and bustle in London would definitely be too stressful for me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":444,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6679],"tags":[761,964,15132,15133,15131,1164,753,1172,15130],"class_list":["post-3224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-kaitlin","tag-architecture","tag-bath","tag-busking","tag-city-planning","tag-commercialism","tag-community","tag-london","tag-oxford","tag-stratford"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/files\/2010\/09\/Driving-Through-the-Countryside.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n