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Always look down in London: Pavement oddities
- Hani1337 4y agoAnd most importantly, because the streets are very slippery and the people look unhappy regardless.
- lordnacho 4y agoWhat are the weird bell-shaped things you find on the curb? https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5073443,-0.1227047,3a,75y,82.74h,81.49t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sJKlIy9aQhE5zPJ9r0oaAVA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DJKlIy9aQhE5zPJ9r0oaAVA%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D77.896645%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5073443,-0.1227047,3a,75y,82... I've seen them in many places, can't think of what they're for.
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoProbably just to prevent cars from driving over that area.
- Oxidation 4y agoTo stop vehicles driving over them. Often on corners[1] to stop HGVs cutting the corner off and driving the back end over the pavement. [1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4860115,-0.102246,0a,42.9y,131.78h,64.92t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sHYJwhFs809N6CwmXBD31jg!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4860115,-0.102246,0a,42.9y,1...
- retube 4y agoThey're normally on the corners of junctions, I always assumed they were to stop vehicles turning too sharply and cutting over the pavement. Occasionally have seen a car stuck on top of one :)
- andylynch 4y agoI unironically recommend following the World Bollard Association if you enjoy seeing these at work.
- OJFord 4y agoKeeping cars to the road, they're just bollards essentially as far as I know - just more decorative.
- andylynch 4y agoBell bollards- they aren’t just more handsome - they are also what’s used when normal bollards aren’t enough, they are able to stop heavier vehicles and far more resistant to damage. They are especially good at stopping trucks cutting corners and enforcing width restrictions.
- _Wintermute 4y agoOriginally to push any HGV trailers back onto the road if they cut the corner [0]. They also work really well at beaching drivers looking at their phones who would have otherwise mounted the pavement. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FiV023ktLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FiV023ktLM
- unwind 4y agoHere, HGV is probably "heavy goods vehicle" [1]. TIL etc. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_goods_vehicle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_goods_vehicle
- makingstuffs 4y agoThought it was going to say because the councils have no funding and our roads/pavements are so battered that you’ll likely fall over and break your ankle if you’re not careful.
- jonatron 4y agoBarnmead Road ( https://goo.gl/maps/uGXKSum8azGJLbU29 https://goo.gl/maps/uGXKSum8azGJLbU29 ) has particularly terrible roads and pavements. It's actually deliberate, because it's a conservation area.
- doublesocket 4y agoThis isn't about being in a conservation area but rather the road being unadopted and therefore not maintained by the council. Beckenham is full of them. https://www.barkergotelee.co.uk/who-is-responsible-for-maintaining-unadopted-road/#:~:text=An%20%E2%80%9Cunadopted%20road%E2%80%9D%20is%20simply,no%20responsibility%20to%20maintain%20it https://www.barkergotelee.co.uk/who-is-responsible-for-maint....
- jonatron 4y agohttps://assets.ctfassets.net/vval1fkv4s9j/L8XTFNyvaSewQWSMOwsmU/c629f10f1de468d097e0bba73ae38fc6/supplementary-planning-guidance.pdf https://assets.ctfassets.net/vval1fkv4s9j/L8XTFNyvaSewQWSMOw... > Some 19th century street furniture also remains, enabling the road to present an excellent understanding of the appearance of many residential areas in the era of horse transport. The council will promote the retention of the original street surfacing and furniture in the conservation area.
- doublesocket 4y agoI stand corrected. There are still various other roads in Beckenham that are not inside a conservation area that are unadopted (and consequently in an absolute state).
- the_mitsuhiko 4y agoI lived in Beckenham right next to such a road and it was absolutely ridiculous. Cabs refused to drive on it because the potholes were so bad.
- ljm 4y agoCroydon has a bunch too. A friend was showing me around there a while ago and at one point we were walking down a wide road with no pavements, large-ish semi-detached houses on each side with decent front gardens. Was something I normally expected in upmarket rural areas and traditional villages.
- jphoward 4y agoThe hydraulic power utility is fascinating - the sheer amount of water lost via leaks from water piping in this century is huge, and so keeping a high pressure system running back then must have been tremendously difficult. Especially given a similar sized leak will have a much larger impact in a higher pressure system.
- dcminter 4y agoI recall reading that during aome street works in the circa 1990s they discovered some 16th Century (?) wooden drinking water piping still in use... The development of the water supply and sewerage in London is super interesting. See e.g. The New River Company and also The Great Stink.
- Spooky23 4y agoMy wife did some work at a municipal water utility and they did find some wooden pipes in service in the early 2000s. The active ones are all gone, but they still find buried ones, especially around an old reservoir that was in the downtown area.
- kijin 4y agoOn the other hand, a leaking high-pressure pipe is extremely noticeable [1], so any damage was probably fixed asap instead of being neglected for ages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explo...
- Foobar8568 4y agoI always look down when walking just for one reason, dog shit (if lucky).
- ttyprintk 4y agoVictory against fatbergs is impossible in the near term. As cities mature, and the use of flushable wipes becomes more accepted, fatbergs will appear in UK and the colonies.
- quadrifoliate 4y agoIt's trivial to stop the fatbergs caused due to flushable wipes if city administrations spend a few minutes thinking about why people use flushable wipes instead of spending time and money in celebrity campaigns [1] against them. The conclusion is obvious – wiping with dry toilet paper is an inefficient, unhygienic, and sometimes painful way of cleaning yourself after defecation. Hence, people use wet wipes to "feel fresher", as the advertisements euphemistically put it. The solution is also quite straightforward – go all the way and replace most uses of toilet paper with bidets or washlets, following the lead of smart nations like Japan. Wet wipe usage will automatically plummet. City planners all over the world should be running campaigns promoting bidet usage and partnering with washlet companies instead of sternly wagging their fingers at wet wipe users. ---------------------------------------- [1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/14/andy-serkis-plays-talking-anus-in-fatberg-prevention-campaign https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/14/andy-serkis-p...
- ttyprintk 4y agoWe’re way past talking anuses; we’re in class-action lawsuit territory against being able to market the term “flushable”. The buyers and users of wipes are changing diapers on little kids and old people, not on-the-go busy professionals. The immense concentrations in sewers are not correlated with office worker productivity. Wipes are convenient to do that in public. Only a few countries have enough trash cans nearby for the occasion. So, if someone is going to market the term flushable, I want them to be responsible for plumbing fiascos when it is.
- europeanguy 4y agoI agree with your solution. However, changing such an ingrained habit isn't trivial at the society scale.
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- gokhan 4y agoCheck Ben Wilson's chewing gum art on the Millennium Bridge as well. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=millennium+bridge+gum+art https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=millenniu...
- jlarcombe 4y agoAnd dotted around the rest of London too! A lovely man, Muswell Hill legend.
- oedenfield 4y agoAnd because the pavements are almost always uneven and made with many stones/pavers rather than poured asphalt or concrete.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- twelve40 4y agoThis is awesome! Didn't make it to London this past year, but everywhere from Paris to Barcelona to Istanbul had space invaders painted on houses. But i guess it doesn't count as "look down"
- am_lu 4y agoThere are markers on pavements where it crosses the Greenwich Prime Meridian line. Got one right outside my house. https://goo.gl/maps/d3pAJqGTJS1W4agT9 https://goo.gl/maps/d3pAJqGTJS1W4agT9
- jansan 4y agoPeople from Berlin are used to look down all the time in order to avoid dog shit on the pavement. When I was looking for an appartment in Berlin, at one viewing appointment there were about 20 other people interested in the same appartment. It was quite nice, but there was an insufferable stink everywhere inside that appartment. After we left I noticed that I had stepped into dog poop before and the reason for the smell was the dog shit stuck to my shoe. I applied and surprisingly there were almost no other applications, so I got accepted. The appartment never smelled that bad again :)
- FastEatSlow 4y agoI'll be keeping this in the back of my mind, just in case. /s
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zeristor 4y agoNot much love for Mr Benn, I just though an episode might explain: https://youtu.be/R3XVJ17uysM https://youtu.be/R3XVJ17uysM
- Growtika 4y agoGreat article. Made me search for cool stats about manhole. Apparently there's a site dedicated only for manhole from around the world https://manhole.co.il/ https://manhole.co.il/
- paganel 4y agoReally cool project, bookmarked. For those interested, for Bucharest there's this [1] blog-post with a few photos of some old manholes. In here [2] there's a list of links from the same project to posts that present some old stuff from and around Bucharest (the text is in Romanian, but there are lots and lots of photos that are self-explanatory). [1] https://www.simplybucharest.ro/?p=36671 https://www.simplybucharest.ro/?p=36671 [2] https://www.simplybucharest.ro/?page_id=12112 https://www.simplybucharest.ro/?page_id=12112
- krsdcbl 4y agoMade me think of this Berlin based artist: https://raubdruckerin.de/ https://raubdruckerin.de/ She uses manhole covers to create prints, "Raubdruck" means "pirated edition" but literally it's "stolen print"
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoI've been taking pictures of manhole covers for around 10 years now. Well, manhole covers, drainage gates, square access covers, and so on. Locally, the challenge is an interesting, somewhat artistic, usually (but not always) urban picture. I've already taken a picture of most designs I see, after all. In any other city, I'm catching the design first. (Tromsø, Norway has a reindeer!) I'm not all that surprised there is a website to catalogue them and am always kind of happy to be reminded that others have the same fascination.
- _a_a_a_ 4y agoThe 'Wood-block paving' I know of as wooden cobbles. Iron-shod horses apparently made a lot of noise on stone and IIRC experiments were done to reduce this, the best results being from using wood not stone for cobbling. So it was a noise reduction thing in essence. One of my locals is a coaching inn that goes back centuries. Where the coaches would have entered is covered by the building above and under that, where people now sit and drink, there are still wooden cobbles. I doubt they're from the original horse-time (which is only a century ago, or less), but there they are.
- BerislavLopac 4y agoJust looking at the first item I absolutely now have to share the amazing "Rivers of London" series of novels, comics and even a TTRPG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Grant_(book_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Grant_(book_series)
- tomhoward 4y agoMy favourite feature when looking down in London (as a foreigner who has only visited a few times, briefly)... The Stanton Warrior drain cover: https://www.google.com/search?q=stanton+warrior+drain+cover&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=stanton+warrior+drain+cover&... They were produced by Stanton Ironworks in Derbyshire, which closed in 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilkeston#Stanton_Ironworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilkeston#Stanton_Ironworks. Many of them must have been replaced with a different brand since then as I noticed fewer had the Stanton Warrior brand when I was last in London in 2019. The British electronic music producers The Stanton Warriors took their name from these covers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanton_Warriors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanton_Warriors. (Also, at adds with the old Google interview brain-teaser, "Why are manhole covers round?" - they're rectangular. So I guess it they don't care so much if these ones fall in the hole, probably because they're not holes that workers go down into).
- antihero 4y agoAlso grime artist Newham Generals were named after the hospital.
- jimnotgym 4y agoManhole covers are round if they cover a pipe and square if they cover a brick built manhole. Your note about them not falling in makes me wonder if Google had a different answer?
- SECProto 4y ago> Manhole covers are round if they cover a pipe and square if they cover a brick built manhole This is inaccurate as a generalization - in the three jurisdictions I've worked in, they're round if they're newer than ~1990, and mix of round and square (or two triangles that go together to make a square) if they're older than that. The frame and cover are replaced independently from the MH structure itself so the cover doesn't tell you anything about the makeup of the structure.
- jimnotgym 4y ago
- PaulRobinson 4y agoOther things to look out for: - Every tube station has a "labyrinth" to find. https://art.tfl.gov.uk/labyrinth/about/ https://art.tfl.gov.uk/labyrinth/about/ - Vehicles drive on the left hand side in the UK. Except at the entrance to the Savoy, where road markings make it clear they must drive on the right. - We love roundabouts. Londonist has a nice article on some of the weird things you can find on some of them here: https://londonist.com/london/secret/the-strange-things-you-can-find-on-london-s-roundabouts https://londonist.com/london/secret/the-strange-things-you-c... - When using transport, the normal rule of thumb is that the underground will be quicker than a bus or even a taxi on many journeys, but sometimes walking beats even that. TfL has a tube map that helps you figure that out (check out Covent Garden to Leicester Square - a 90 second tube journey that takes at least 8-10 minutes due to the depth of the line): https://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-tube-map.pdf https://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-tube-map.pdf
- europeanguy 4y ago> We love roundabouts Context for our American friends. This isn't specific to London. Everywhere I've lived in Europe is more roundabout-heavy than the USA. Because, you know, they're objectively superior ;-)
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoThey are also spreading in the USA. New Jersey has had them for quite a long time, and is building more. I've been surprised to see them as an apparent new default for new intersections in central Wisconsin where my wife's family is from. There are even some new ones being added around Santa Fe where I live.
- coyotespike 4y agoYes, I agree both that they are objectively superior and that happily they are spreading! At first I would see people treat them like a slight curve in the road and blow through them, but we seem to have figured them out now
- 2dvisio 4y agoNice to see Harrow in there. The wavy double yellow lines are down the corner from where I live and I always thought they would be a common thing…
- stevesearer 4y agoI have a hobby of posting these sorts of things around Santa Barbara while out running: https://www.instagram.com/santabarbaradetails/ https://www.instagram.com/santabarbaradetails/ Most are survey markers, contractor stamps, road names, etc...
- TomWhitwell 4y agoThis is my favourite ‘always look down in London’ https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-buried-remains-of-little-compton-street-london-england https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-buried-remains-of-li... - an old road running well below street level but visible through a grate
- cmehdy 4y agoI genuinely read the title as "always look down on London" and my French mind was as vindicated as it was puzzled by it. The article however is much more interesting and full of those little things that make living in old and beautiful cities worth it. In Paris I found that looking at walls (and decorations), street layouts and names, could offer similar journeys.
- yardshop 4y agoOne could accompany this with the track "Looking Down on London" by the perfect pop band Komputer from their 90s album The World Of Tomorrow, if one liked Kraftwerk inspired electronica. It's not really about the same thing, just similar sounding titles, and a nice excuse to mention one of my old favorite albums! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAk4D3Lszdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAk4D3Lszdo
- readthenotes1 4y agoThe "<--LOOK RIGHT" painting is genius. For person who only had one job, they took it to 11. Could be shocked if most people who see that note don't look both ways...
- Jdstanhope 4y agoDon't forget to look for the pieces of gum that have been painted everywhere. https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/england/london/articles/ben-wilsons-chewing-gum-art-on-the-millennium-bridge/ https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/england/lon....
- harywilke 4y agoIn Athens, Greece my favorite example of this is where you walk over the ancient city walls. There is a section of wall revealed by a dig in Kotzia square[1]. The nearby paving traces the walls, and further on the National Bank is raised up so you can see the wall continuing on.[2] [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9818329,23.7288448,120m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9818329,23.7288448,120m/data... [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Acharnian+Gates/@37.9808607,23.7285171,3a,75y,64.08h,90.19t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sSMnwYJac_luFVVeU1utn2g!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x14a1bd3ad8b3ebe3:0x874520e70f7ed85d!8m2!3d37.9810788!4d23.7288571 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Acharnian+Gates/@37.980860...