A couple of weeks ago diamond geezer had its third best day in terms of numbers of visitors to the blog, all thanks to a post I wrote about asbestosis. Yesterday it happened again, this time the fourth best day ever, all thanks to my post 'Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall'. Again the visitors arrived from American quirkportal Hacker News, a lot of whom were duly surprised that European cities have Roman remnants lying around in inauspicious locations.
My original post only got 9 comments but the forum delivered over 90, mostly from people unfamiliar with London and this blog. Here are some of the rabbit holes people fell down.
> I had only just thought about how weird it is that there is wall at Tower Hill, and wall at Barbican - they can't be the same run of wall as it was built, can they? That'd be immense...
>> There is a London Wall Walk which follows the original line of the wall from the Tower of London to the Museum of London.
> In a locked room off that car park is a bit more of that fortification.
>> From that car park it's only a short walk to London's Roman amphitheatre. It doesn't seem to be very well known but is quite impressive.
>>> One more strange place: the barbershop in Leadenhall Market. You can see the wall right in the barbershop. In fact, this wall drove their rent higher and eventually they closed. (Forgive the sob story but the barber was amazing, and I have not been able to track him down since!)
> The juxtaposition of a mundane parking garage built directly on top of ancient Roman ruins is incredible.
>> Meh. Let me introduce you to Colchester, the oldest recorded town in the UK. The wall behind the carpark you see here is the original Roman wall (circa 65 AD) with modern brick on top.
>>> I can only imagine how many similar places to see ancient ruins in everyday context are in Rome. Or Athens.
>>>> For another interesting mix of new and ancient, check out Serdica metro station in Sofia, Bulgaria. It's fully inside an excavated Roman-era ruin. Very cool!
> Note this is about the City of London, an entity much smaller and older than the modern city known as London.
>> For even further confusion "London" actually contains two cities: London and Westminster.
>>> What about Southwark? That has a cathedral too.
>>>> A cathedral is neither necessary nor sufficient for city status.
> "ground level then was a few metres lower than now." What?! That's huge. What happened?
>> If you leave ground alone all sort of things grow on it or lay on it. Dirt, mud, leaves etc. Soil grows at about 1 mm per year. 1 meter in 1000 years.
>>> Before industrial demolition was common, old buildings would be torn down and material repurposed for new constructions, built on top of existing foundations and rubble. Do this enough over the centuries and your city will slowly rise in height.
> Nevermind the wall, this person's blog dates back to 2002...
