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Where is London's most central sheep?
- walthamstow 2y agoWhile Trafalgar is known as the official centre of London, you’d have trouble convincing anyone that Vauxhall is more central than Spitalfields.
- gadders 2y agoIt's Charing Cross: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross#:~:text=Since%20the%20early%2019th%20century,distances%20from%20London%20are%20measured https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross#:~:text=Since%20....
- walrus01 2y agoAs a non British person I would think the center of the city would be some point equidistant centrally between the boundaries of the original roman city wall, in the square mile, but the actual center of the city seems to have migrated since then.
- dghf 2y ago> I would think the center of the city would be some point equidistant centrally between the boundaries of the original roman city wall That would be the centre of the City, but not necessarily of the city.
- nicoburns 2y agoModern London encompasses two historic settlements (the city of London, and westminster). What is now consider the centre is somewhere between the two. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster
- madeofpalk 2y agoThe center of the city has just as much (or more) to do with vibes than physical geography.
- MrsPeaches 2y agoAnything that is south of the River Thames is considered "South" (prounounced "Souf" in MLE [1]), no matter the actual distance. E.g. Waterloo Station would be considered South London but is actually at the same latitude as Buckingham Palace! Hence why a Londoner would never describe Vauxhall as "Central". Londoners would generally discount any part of this map south of the river from "Central London": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_London#/media/File:Open_street_map_central_london.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_London#/media/File:Ope...
- Pinus 2y agoSome years ago, I was looking for London hotels on some booking site, and noticed that they were listed as being so-and-so many km (with .1 or even .01 precision) from London, which seemed amusing given that they were all in London. So I fired up QGIS and drew a circle (in some suitable projection!) with the indicated radius around each hotel, and found that they intersected on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.
- Quarrel 2y agoAs the parent indicated, this stuff is surprisingly standardised in London. Distance is measured from Charing Cross. The Cross is near Nelson's Column, but I would be surprised if the column was actually the central point. As others have pointed out, this leads to some weirdness, as lots assume that the City (old London & older Roman London) would be the obvious place to measure things from.
- fredoralive 2y agoThe original Charing Cross was at the south of the square, where the statue of Charles I is now. (The cross at the railways station nearby is a Victorian folly).
- anyonecancode 2y agoIn a similar vein, for New York City the official highway distance to the city is measured from Columbus Circle [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Circle
- andrewaylett 2y agoIn Edinburgh, it's the old post office building at the end of Princes Street. Which is also where the A1, A7, and A8 meet.
- cesaref 2y agoThere's also the confusion as to whether people mean 'Greater London' or 'The City of London'. For the centre of the City, i've generally thought that Leadenhall Market is the centre, given it is built on the original Roman Forum. For non-Londoners, the city was originally a walled city, and lies to the east end of what is now considered greater london. It's these days synonymous with the financial industry. There are special laws for it, honours like Freedom of the City, it's quite an interesting place. Although the wall is long gone, there are place names which refer to it, and the gates which exited through it. So we have roads like 'London Wall' and locations like Bishopsgate, Aldgate etc. Newgate was added in the 12th century, so not exactly 'New' these days, so not a very future proof naming convention... https://leadenhallmarket.co.uk/history-of-leadenhall-market/ https://leadenhallmarket.co.uk/history-of-leadenhall-market/ https://inspiringcity.com/2013/04/13/the-seven-gates-of-london/ https://inspiringcity.com/2013/04/13/the-seven-gates-of-lond...
- gadders 2y ago>>Although the wall is long gone... You can still see chunks of the wall: https://livinglondonhistory.com/londons-ancient-roman-and-medieval-walls-a-self-guided-walk/ https://livinglondonhistory.com/londons-ancient-roman-and-me...
- gadders 2y agoAlso, if you want see some cool Roman stuff, there is a Temple of Mithras under the new Bloomberg headquarters near Cannon Street station. https://www.londonmithraeum.com/ https://www.londonmithraeum.com/ Free to enter, but pre-booking recommended.
- foldr 2y agoThere aren’t any special laws for the City of London (except any local byelaws). The City is administered in its own unique way, but English law applies just like anywhere else in England. https://www.quora.com/Does-the-City-of-London-as-it-is-defined-really-exist-outside-of-the-jurisdiction-of-normal-UK-law-If-so-in-what-way https://www.quora.com/Does-the-City-of-London-as-it-is-defin...
- MrsPeaches 2y agoThe River Thames, confusing Londoners sense of space since times immemorial.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- steerpike 2y agoWhen my wife and I lived in Bristol we developed a metric designed to measure how enjoyable a city was to live in that we called "time to sheep". Basically it's a measure of how long you have to travel from the center of the city before you're in the English countryside surrounded by sheep and the best cities have a low (but not too low) "time to sheep" metric. It helped explain one of the reasons we loved living in Bristol so much when we had such a hard time living in London. Could also have been that Bristol is just a crazy beautiful city to live in, but where's the fun in that, right?
- walrus01 2y agoPresumably this could be quantified through a call to something like the Google maps api for a specific lat/long starting point, for driving, walking or biking time in minutes, as an SLP (sheep latency protocol)
- f4c39012 2y agothere's also a measure of the minimum appropriate "time to sheep" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement#Sheppey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_meas...
- wheybags 2y agoMy metric for when you've left the city is "have I passed a field of potatoes"
- 369548684892826 2y agoThis probably works best in Idaho
- walrus01 2y agoIn the broadest possible sense, Idaho can be divided into "potato" and "non-potato" Idaho. For instance if you drive US95 through here (the creatively named Idaho County, Idaho) it's almost entirely wheat farms, and what isn't a wheat farm is either forest, wilderness or cattle ranch. The potato part doesn't really start until you get down into the whole valley/flat land area occupied by Meridian, Boise, Nampa, etc. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Grangeville,+ID+83530,+USA/@46.1171825,-116.1979828,45015m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x54a0c1784b5a468d:0xc1b554fc4611c93c!8m2!3d45.9257777!4d-116.1199559!16zL20vMHMxdzc?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDEyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/place/Grangeville,+ID+83530,+USA...
- Pinus 2y agoIsn’t there a recurring publicity stunt with sheep on Savile Row? =)
- walrus01 2y agoLooking at the satellite view of some grassy rooftops in the city of London (the square mile), it seems to me that a sufficiently motivated wealthy person could keep several sheep in a more central location. Some of those roofs look like they have more habitat space than the most central sheep lives in.
- defrost 2y agoThere are literal multi floor spacious underground bunkers in London beneath some of the more exclusive and expensive properties. A good many are known by filed dimensions, some are suspected to be larger than declared. While a number may be urban bunkers, others ostentatious wealth displays for shoes, clothes, jewels, and rare collectables of the very wealthy perhaps one is home to a rabbit .. or a sheep.
- walrus01 2y agoFor all we know, some wealthy sheep collector has sheep in a 3rd level sub basement in their London townhouse, strapped into an oculus headset and roaming around on a multi dimensional treadmill through endless grassy spring time fields.
- dghf 2y ago> some are suspected to be larger than declared I can't find a link now, but allegedly the Crossrail project accidentally tunnelled into one of these.
- gadders 2y agoA friend of mine at a city brokers with a rooftop garden told me that one of the traders released some rabbits there. You could sit on the trading floor and look up and see them stretched out on the glass atrium roof sunbathing.
- Quarrel 2y agoFinding the most central rabbit would be quite the task!
- gadders 2y agoFYI - he's published an update: https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-sheepish-apology.html https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-sheepish-apolog... tl;dr; - he missed a small zoo near Waterloo Station.
- Havoc 2y agoPretty wild to blog about that topic in particular haha. Those all look closer to sheep singular? Mudchute has maybe 30ish
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoAs a long time DG reader, this is both really on brand and completely novel.
- willvarfar 2y agoI clicked on it expecting an article on how to trip up LLMs. Refreshing change that it wasn't! :D So, do any LLMs give any humorously nonsensical answers?
- leprechaun1066 2y ago> they're goats, as any self-respecting three year old could tell you Sheep or goat? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCzZN--4Its https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCzZN--4Its
- ageitgey 2y ago[Deleted as I missed the reference in the article]
- pseudonymcoward 2y agoThe author addresses this in the post. "I'm not interested in temporary sheep like those that get driven over Southwark Bridge in September or shorn at the Lambeth Country Show in June."
- shawabawa3 2y agoyou have made the tragic mistake of not reading literally the second sentence of the article: > I'm not interested in temporary sheep like those that get driven over Southwark Bridge in September or shorn at the Lambeth Country Show in June
- mxfh 2y agoIf you're in Berlin, especially with kids, there more than a dozen of children's farmyards (not counting zoos and actual farms) all quite central in multi-centric Berlin. Mostly for (early) childhood educational purposes, so they are are prime spot for Kindergarten day trips. https://www.berlin.de/kultur-und-tickets/tipps/kinder/kinderbauernhoefe/ https://www.berlin.de/kultur-und-tickets/tipps/kinder/kinder... https://www.visitberlin.de/en/farms-children https://www.visitberlin.de/en/farms-children Since most of them are in former West-Berlin the reason they exist can likely be explained from a mixture of empty lots not rebuild after the bombing in WWII, historical farms in outer Groß-Berlin (Domäne Dahlem) and the impracticality of casual trips into the countryside with kids beyond the wall.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throw0101c 2y agoIf anyone is in/visiting Toronto, Canada, there's a farm right downtown: * https://riverdalefarmtoronto.ca https://riverdalefarmtoronto.ca * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverdale_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverdale_Farm * https://www.blogto.com/city/2018/09/riverdale-farm-toronto/ https://www.blogto.com/city/2018/09/riverdale-farm-toronto/
- dhosek 2y agoHmm, not sure where the closest sheep is to me here in the inner suburbs of Chicago, but there is a goat farm a couple miles away in the Austin neighborhood. It’s pretty wild seeing them take the herd to their pasture a couple blocks away from the house where their shed is in the back yard.
- tptacek 2y agoI'm in the same inner suburb. Where's that goat farm?
- kasey_junk 2y agoHorses are common in my part of the city. It is absolutely common to see people riding in Washington Park.
- JimmyWilliams1 2y ago[dead]
- te_chris 2y agoMy son loves the city farms. Mudchute one is huge and great.
- surfingdino 2y agoNo sheep in Canary Wharf? They have a farm there, don't they?
- Xophmeister 2y agoVauxhall and Spitalfields are much closer to Trafalgar Square.
- biomene 2y agoThat would be mudchute farm. But Canary Wharf is not considered part of central London, which is what the author is concerned with.
- Xophmeister 2y agoLooks like there's an errata, already :) https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-sheepish-apology.html https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-sheepish-apolog...
- jrmg 2y agoSome good advice at the end of that: 1) Don't state something as fact when you haven't researched it fully. 2) Remember that when you do state something because you believe it's fact, it could be based on incomplete information. 3) If you're not 100% sure about something, best introduce at least some element of doubt. 4) Don't trust everything you read just because somebody you trust presented it as fact.
- nottorp 2y agoIt also says "But they might have been goats.".
- asjir 2y agoI think this was overly self-critical - what would researching fully even mean? They can have however many sheep they want hidden within one-mile distance from Trafalgar square, no-one would expect the author to scour every possible location ensuring that there is no sheep hidden lol just to make a funny post 100% sure to be true
- ajb 2y agoGuy knows his audience though. All of his posts are incredibly prone to bikeshedding. If our main journalists knew that their output was going to be subject to much detail-oriented scrutiny, we'd have the best-run country in the world.
- jrmg 2y agoMuch of his bikeshedding is obviously self-deprecating humor to me. It’s simultaneously both genuine and ironic. I think that people sometimes don’t (can’t?) quite ‘get’ that wry-but-also-sincere style that much of British humor exhibits.
- barrettondricka 2y agoWouldn't that need to be the sheep with the closest distance to all the other sheeps in London?
- shermantanktop 2y agoIn order to measure distance between sheep, you really should start from the center of the sheep. So let’s make the math easier by assuming a spherical sheep in a vacuum…
- Theodores 2y agoNever mind sheep, what about cats? Larry, the Number 10 cat has to be a contender. Considering the wealth of the nation was based on the woollen trade, with London being the place where weavers from Flanders made that wealth, times have changed. The Speaker's Chair in the House of Lords is still a wool sack, although, a few years ago, it was found to be stuffed with horsehair. The Royal Navy grew to defend the cross channel trade in wool and that led to 'Britannia Rules The Waves' in a big way, up until about a century ago. The British weather and the plague made it so that wool was the winning product, with the customers being the armies of Europe and the slaves that needed to be clothed. Although mining was crucial to the Industrial Revolution, wool was the original cradle of innovation. We owe so much to wool, and sheep. Oh, Fuller's Earth was also crucial to the success story, needed for cleaning wool, along with urine, which peasants provided all by themselves, in abundance. Other wool was not with the long, tough fibres that British wool had, hence the desirability of the product.
- walrus01 2y agoThere's also not one, but two City livery companies that claim the wool trade, at #4 and #43 in order of precedence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livery_company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livery_company
- captainbland 2y agoLast time I was there they had grazing sheep in Green Park. That's pretty central!
- Rochus 2y agoThese poor sheep have to live on a concrete floor and hardly ever see a real meadow.
- mattkevan 2y agoWe used to live just a few minutes from the Oasis Waterloo farm and I can confirm there are indeed sheep. Pigs too. For being so central it was surprisingly rural - there were horse stables and an apple orchard with all kinds of rare varieties just over the road from our flat. As an aside, a family member recently became a Freeman of the City of London which means they're officially allowed to drive sheep over London bridge.
- eitally 2y agoI can't speak for further up the peninsula, but the nearest sheep to me in San Jose is almost certainly at Emma Prusch Farm Park (http://www.pruschfarmpark.org/ http://www.pruschfarmpark.org/), which like the city farms mentioned in the blog, is a nonprofit farm in the middle-ish of the city. Depending where you live in SJ, though, you may be closer to Happy Hollow Park & Zoo[2], which also has sheep. From there you get into actual farms, and there are at least two within a few miles: Ray of Sunshine Farm in Almaden Valley (mostly focus on produce & goat cheese, but do have sheep): https://www.rayofsunshinefarm.com/ https://www.rayofsunshinefarm.com/ and Deer Hollow Farm in Cupertino (another non-profit): https://deerhollowfarmfriends.org/ https://deerhollowfarmfriends.org/ From there, there are a bunch more sheep farms heading south toward Gilroy & Hollister, but that's getting a bit too far afield. Frankly, I'm actually surprised there were so many civic farms in the south bay. That said, for south & east bay folks, I think it would be a lot more interesting to track the roaming herds of goats used to keep dry grass & brush to a minimum in fire hazard areas.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- OJFord 2y agoThe answer depends when you ask: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_City#Freedom_of_the_City_of_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_City#Freedom_of...
- jeffreysmith 2y agoChiming in to rep for our flock, the 5 most central sheep in NYC, conveniently located on Governors Island. https://www.govisland.com/things-to-do/recreation/hammock-grove-sheep https://www.govisland.com/things-to-do/recreation/hammock-gr...
- chris1993 2y agoFor NSW it’s time to dead kangaroo on the roadside
- gus_massa 2y ago> London Zoo's website does not reveal the existence of any sheep - at best llamas. I never visited London, but in my experience children love sheep and bunnies more than elephants and giraffes. In the Zoo here in Buenos Aires the most crowed part was the "farm" were the children could feed and touch the animals. [1] [2] So I made a search in Google and I got: * https://www.flickr.com/photos/markestes/167928458 https://www.flickr.com/photos/markestes/167928458 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=664GiPJBHaQ&t=84s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=664GiPJBHaQ&t=84s Is this the correct zoo? [1] Now it was rebuild and renamed as an "ecopark". I never paid a visit after it reopened, but I guess now it's a big "farm" with a few legacy "zoo" animals. [2] Don't ask me how many times I had to go to the baby bunnies spot.
- oo2312 2y ago[dead]
- lvturner 2y agoBut where is the farthest sheep from the center of London?
- lukaslalinsky 2y agoWe bought an old house in remote parts of southern Slovakia. There is a city nearby, not a big city, but big enough to not expect farm animals in it. I was very surprised to see sheep in the garden of the main church. Sometimes they set up a temporary fence outside of church and let them there. It really made me feel good and smile, to see them in the city centre.
- jbirer 2y agoIn London, you are the sheep to be slaughtered with a knife.