{"id":492,"date":"2009-08-24T12:12:52","date_gmt":"2009-08-24T16:12:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/linux.dickinson.edu\/wpmu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=492"},"modified":"2009-08-24T12:12:52","modified_gmt":"2009-08-24T16:12:52","slug":"romans-writers-and-wharfs-oh-my","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2009\/08\/romans-writers-and-wharfs-oh-my\/","title":{"rendered":"Romans, Writers, and Wharfs… oh my!"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I first left Tower Hill Tube station and looked out over the road to the Tower of London, my first thought was “I really wish those cars weren’t driving on the road so I could get a clear picture.”\u00a0 Then I managed to get over my disappointment, reminding myself that I will be going there eventually and will be able to take pictures in abundance, I looked around and noticed the section of Roman Wall standing less than 100 feet to my left.\u00a0 I admit, knowing the importance of the Romans and the impact their wall had on the development of today’s London, I feel kind of silly for letting my eyes slide over it to the prettier and more picturesque Tower.\u00a0 That written, I think that my mistake of dismissing the wall as nothing but an unimportant ruin happens to countless tourists and even the people of London every day!\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The

Roman Wall my eyes skimmed in favor of the Tower of London<\/p><\/div>\n

What I found most interesting about the Roman Walk was the idea that London is a modern city built on top of several stages of ancient city.\u00a0 The fact that the basement of a hair salon can house Roman ruins is difficult to fathom.\u00a0 However, the\u00a0knowledge that people in the medieval ages recognized the brilliance of Roman engineering and decided to fortify and expand the existing wall is even more incredible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Medieval

Medieval section built on top of Roman Wall - complete with pigeons!<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0 When I started my second of two walks of yesterday, I didn’t know very much about the area or the people who have lived there.\u00a0 Although it was really neat to see where this writer and that philosopher worked and played, I was much more interested in\u00a0the buildings and how they related to the history of London.\u00a0 There was one section of the tour that particularly captured my attention.\u00a0 When standing in the centre of one of the green spaces,\u00a0you could look to one side and see original row houses, with the dark brown brick and white window frames, and to the other side you could only see bright red brick houses that seemed to have been completed in the last five to ten years.\u00a0\u00a0The original houses that still stand were only cosmetically damaged during the Blitz; while the red brick homes had been completely annihilated.\u00a0 What shocked me was that only a small span of grass and trees separated the barely injured and the completely destroyed.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Original

Original rowhouses that were barely damaged in the Blitz<\/p><\/div>\n

\"New

New red brick rowhouses where old ones were destroyed in the Blitz<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0Today at the Docklands Museum, the City and River: 1800-1840 exhibit really stood out.\u00a0 I’m not a huge fan of taxes and duties, but there was a section on customs and why the docks had to be formed that made a lot of sense to me.\u00a0 It explained that there was so much illegal shipping into London through unauthorized channels that something had to be done by the government to try to control it\/use it to their advantage\u00a0to get\u00a0more money through taxes.\u00a0 What I found particularly interesting was that the proprietors of the different docks were paranoid of each other to a fault.\u00a0 They didn’t trust the police to look after their docks and warehouses, so they hired personal security forces to keep out anyone they didn’t want around.\u00a0 After seeing the different wharfs and how close they were to each other when I went up to Greenwich the other day, I completely understand the paranoia of the businessmen.<\/p>\n

Even though I’ve been in London for only\u00a0four days, I feel like I’m slowly beginning to understand that there is much more the London than I could have possibly imagined.\u00a0 I’m learning that I need to keep my eyes open because you never know when you’ll turn a corner and find the next nugget of history, culture, art, or architecture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first left Tower Hill Tube station and looked out over the road to the Tower of London, my first thought was “I really wish those cars weren’t driving on the road so I could get a clear picture.”\u00a0 Then I managed to get over my disappointment, reminding myself that I will be going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[744],"tags":[767,787,845,863],"class_list":["post-492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kelley","tag-bloomsbury-walk","tag-docklands-museum","tag-roman-walk","tag-thames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492","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\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}