Oil Drum Lane

  See the headings above. This is a scrolling list of blog posts in no particular order. It is better to start at one of the two  PAGES in the headings above.   The SCRAPYARD Page   is oblique musings on places and spaces, real and imagined, old and new. This is  my 'Cabinet of Curiosities' and while probably don't share all of my arcane predilections, if you root around a bit, you might find something that catches your eye. The content wanders but has a London bias. My gaff, my rules.  It is configured primarily for reading on a phone but blogger software is imperfect in so many ways, there will be glitches. I don't have an excuse for the typos and factual errors.  The SOAPBOX Page    is a reliquary of my former professional involvement in shaping towns, not in design but rather in working out how to make change happen. Some of the posts here comprise material I prepared when I became more involved in  the nitty gritty of policy an...

In the 1600s in Holland, for the first time painters didn't set out to inspire, threaten, moralise or remind us of our place in God's universe; but just to show us what life was like then. We got  four-hundred-year old photo albums. It was the Golden Age of the 'United Provinces' of the  young  Dutch Republic, recently liberated from rule by Catholic Spain and with a booming economy driven by overseas trade, supplanting Antwerp in Belgium, which had remained under Spanish control. And i t was a country similar to our own, to the extent that by the end of the century we shared a ruler! Their William of Orange became England's William III. This is how it looked at the outset:  Netherlands 1609. In England at the time, wealthier people invested in land. In Southern Europe, paying to tart up churches was the ticket to a comfortable afterlife although, like crypto, it relied on suspended disbelief for its value. In both cases aristocratic patrons did !). In most cases, a...

  In my post 'Lie of the Land', I explored what it means to own land as an individual and how this has evolved. Now, I want to question the basis of the 'irridentist' claims made by some nations to lands beyond their current borders. While individual issues lead to trouble and strife, national disputes often ended up in horrific bloodshed, usually spilt by civilians and conscripts sent off to fight these wars and seldom by those who started them. The nature of the problem has changed over time. Until comparatively recently, empires, kingdoms and other fiefdoms exercised strong control over their heartlands but less over borderlands, especially where these were not defined by natural features such as rivers or mountains. In Britain, the Welsh Marches were the borderlands where de facto control was delegated by the King to the local warlords on the frontline of a constant struggle to increase or defend territory. Marcher Lords  Very often, the  motive underlying an irrede...