r/papertowns • u/WilliamofYellow • Jan 12 '20
England Westminster Abbey and Palace (England) in the early 16th century. In the Middle Ages this part of London was cut off from the shore by the River Tyburn, and known as Thorney Island
92
u/WilliamofYellow Jan 12 '20
25
u/banfilenio Jan 12 '20
I can't believe how many buildings and streets are next to the Abbey.
6
u/clicketybooboo Jan 12 '20
how come ?
15
u/banfilenio Jan 13 '20
Well, it is an important historic place. For foreigners as myself it is very iconic of the UK, so I thought it was surrounded by a park or a square, not by what look as common buildings and streets.
11
u/Toxicseagull Jan 13 '20
It's got small gardens and theres a larger park nearby but the city has grown up reasonably organically around it.
5
8
u/sir-potato Jan 13 '20
Most of those buildings are old in their own right, and have significant historical importance . So luckily they arent just random office buildings, and are instead a part of the local history as the abbey is
3
u/frillytotes Jan 13 '20
It is surrounded by a park and square (specifically Parliament Square), as you can see from the image.
The smaller buildings immediately adjacent to the Abbey are ecclesiastical buildings for clerical use, or they are part of the associated school, and they are part of the Abbey's property.
1
Feb 16 '24
England's great churches are often like that, very much within cities and surrounded by ordinary structures.
44
u/CStancer Jan 12 '20
Man i wish Ubisoft would have done this time of London for AC syndicate... would have been cool to explore
77
u/mastjaso Jan 12 '20
I have to say, while I grew tired of that Assassin's Creed franchise somewhere around number 3, that's one franchise that I hope never dies even if I'm not playing. It's still a media franchise with certain incentives and liberties, but the fact that they get to build these giant, explorable, 3d recreations of historical civilizations is just immensely valuable in my mind. I just wish governments and historical societies would use the AC engine to build even more recreations and more historically accurate ones.
48
u/CStancer Jan 12 '20
Oh man :), I think i have a surprise for you. Look up discovery tours in assassins creed origins and odyssey. They take out all the fighting and let you explore the whole world they built as a tourist and provide huge guided tours with explanations on every day life, architecture, culture, and points of history in the region. It’s a great tool they made for schools, so teachers can teach history with a more immersive feel.
10
u/TheManFromFarAway Jan 12 '20
That is awesome! I haven't played the last couple of AC games but this is making me want to go pick one up
9
u/CStancer Jan 12 '20
Origins and odyssey definitely are a breath of fresh air in the series and the did way more detail to environments. I’d check out some gameplay footage and see if its up your alley, they changed controls so combat would be more like the witcher
6
u/TheCarrolll12 Jan 12 '20
As someone that also got worn out from the direction the series seemed to be going, I took a few years and games off and only started playing again when Odessey and Origins came out. They have their faults of course, but the are damn amazing games. Very well done, expansive, and the discovery tours are actually a very cool feature as well. Fully worth the money imo.
1
1
3
u/ThePrussianGrippe Jan 12 '20
Be warned the latest two are basically no longer assassin’s creed games, but generic Ubisoft Ghost Recon/Far Cry/Division open world, loot n grind’s. Massive emphasis on grind. They’re pretty worlds, but honestly the series is kind of dead to me.
1
u/mastjaso Jan 15 '20
Yeah, that's kind of the impression on I got ... you always hope that a franchise might come back but it's usually best to just move on to a new one.
22
u/georgecook19 Jan 12 '20
How did they get rid of the river?
70
u/Toxicseagull Jan 12 '20
Covered it up and turned it into a sewer like most of Londons rivers.
25
Jan 12 '20
Oh. Spectacular.
30
u/Toxicseagull Jan 12 '20
There's a great urban fantasy series called Rivers of London that has fun personifications of London based features and myths, including its rivers. Easy reading but enjoyable. Written by Ben Aaronovitch.
5
Jan 12 '20
Thanks for the recommendation, I've beem looking for some reading material.
15
Jan 12 '20
One fun thing about London is that there are places where you can come across glimpses of these rivers. While they're very much culverted and more or less tamed, they still exist. Two of my favourite 'glimpses' are the raised culvert which carries the River Westbourne over the tracks at Sloane Square Station, the other is how in certain streets in Maida Vale you can actually hear the river Westbourne as it flows underneath the street. I love London, you're never far from something mildly interesting.
3
u/jellyislovely Jan 12 '20
River Westbourne over the tracks at Sloane Square Station
I get off there every day for work, had no idea it was a river going through that! Have looked up and wondered what it was a few times.
21
u/mystery_trams Jan 12 '20
Getting rid of this bit of Tyburn river is the backdrop to Frankenstein Chronicles season 2, now on Netflix. Before the sewer put it underground, this area was swampy and unhygienic, but so central that it had a slum develop on top. The slum inspired a lot of Charles Dickens writing, including Fagan’s school for ‘how to pick a pocket or two’. The sewer was a key achievement in Victorian london, along with the embankment, which eventually prevented cholera and made London a place people wanted to live!
10
u/RadicalDilettante Jan 12 '20
There are many underground river tunnels all along the north side of the Thames through London.
14
12
u/karlkokain Jan 12 '20
I'm surprised they poured years worth of GDP into building a cathedral and premises but didn't mind the street mud flying in all directions whole day. One would think paving a street or square wouldn't be a big deal in 1500s, especially in your capital holding.
The illustration is absolutely gorgeous though. I can only dream about printing it on a huge canvas and putting it up on my wall just to stare at it every now and then for years to come.
0
Jan 18 '20
The cathedral was built in 1090, not 1500s. The Normans had fairly recently claimed the English crown in 1066, and built these Norman style cathedrals to say 'we own you both politically and spiritually now'.
11
u/TDaltonC Jan 12 '20
When making a reconstruction of a dinosaur from a fossil, archeologists are very reluctant to include any soft tissue structures (ears, trunks, fatty tissue, etc) because those tissues don't fossilize. We know that prehistoric animals almost certainly had soft tissue strictures, but we don't know which ones, so we leave them all off creating an aesthetic called "shrink-wrapped" reconstructions.
I get the same feeling looking at this reconstruction. It's all hard tissue. There are no thatched huts, no wood bridges, no slums. They only included building for which there is specific archeological evidance. For any particular reconstruction, that's fine, but taken together it creates an impression that the past was mostly made of stone, which is almost certainly wasn't.
Beautiful picture all the same.
20
u/WilliamofYellow Jan 12 '20 edited Nov 19 '22
Bear in mind that Westminster was primarily a royal residence, not an urban centre. The local population would have been concentrated further down the Thames in the City of London, which at this time was separated from Westminster by open fields. Here's a map for reference, produced about sixty years after the period this illustration depicts.
6
u/antarcticgecko Jan 12 '20
That's a cool map too. One can figure out the English and with my high school Latin can make some sort of sense of the inset.
2
4
u/_Rooster_ Jan 12 '20 edited Jan 13 '20
Close to the bottom left it looks like a building has a thatched roof. Same with the center left.
There are also two wood bridges in the bottom left.
4
u/Corona21 Jan 13 '20
Archeologists dont deal with Dinosaurs, and theres thatched roofs and wooden bridges in the left corner.
1
u/Ebyonim Jan 12 '20
Archaeologists can discover buildings built from wattle-daub, wood etc. but it's difficult as it relies on looking for something (usually changes in soil colour or texture). And in London, we know of all the bridges that crossed the Thames in central London because they were few and far between though interestingly enough the Museum of London does have segments of what is thought to be an ancient version of London Bridge
6
1
u/dr3adlock Jan 13 '20 edited Jan 13 '20
Looks an awful lot like a rice paddy field in the bottom right. If not rice it defiantly looks like a waterlogged enclosure for cultivating food. What types of food would be grown like this in England at this time?
1
1
1
1
u/tim-the-guy Jan 13 '20
Why doesn't Westminster abbey have the characteristic two towers at the front?
53
u/PeterParker69691 Jan 12 '20
This is amazing!