Oil Drum Lane

  This website is simply  a scrolling list of scribblings and musings in no particular order. To see if there is anything that interests you, check the 'Contents' index above; all the posts are linked from there.    It isn't a diary or a diatribe. Rather, it is  a collection of notes from the remote  periphery of everyday relevance,  on offbeat places, real and imagined, and the events and people that shaped them. The content wanders but has a London bias. My gaff, my rules.  I don't have an excuse for the typos and factual errors, but it hopefully now has  LESS  FEWER TYPOS AND SLIGHTLY IMPROVED GRAMMAR!  Why Oil Drum Lane?  The boomers among you might recall the TV comedy 'Steptoe & Son'.  They were Rag & Bone men, living and working in an imagined scrapyard in West London. Just the place to go looking for gems in the dust!  If you are looking for my bike routes with their detailed notes on places to go ...

  At the end of the last post, I described the failing agriculture and the dramatic fall in population in the 1300s.  Recovery was slow. The feudal system was already in decline, but now labour shortages put the peasants and serfs in a position to weaken the ties of servitude and demand better wages from the landowners.  Working for the Man. This had consequences. L andowners who could no longer rely on the peasantry to do their farming for them sought to rent their land out, often to  the same peasants. (The word 'farmer' now appears. It is derived from the medieval Latin 'firmarius', someone who rents, not farms). Many f ound that pastoral farming was less labour-intensive and that sheep bred for wool were more profitable, while the new tenant farmers were incentivised to improve their l ot. All this led to the creation of fenced and hedged boundaries around previously open land to mark ownership and  manage livestock. This  'enclosure' of previously open...

The story so far has been of plague, famine and anarchy.  Scroll forward to around 600 AD, and things had improved. Two powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Wessex and Mercia, had emerged from the fractured mess of southern Britain. Later, they were joined by Danes who arrived as raiders but settled in places. Their respective fortunes and territories waxed and waned. If you are interested, y ou can see the progress in this neat little video.   Link:  Engelond Saxon Subbuteo Team  As things settled down a bit, people took advantage of the empty spaces.  A s the population expanded again, the landscape became one  of dispersed farms and hamlets. M ore fertile land was occupied, woodland clearance restarted, and more difficult land on the higher ground and in the clay vales was brought into use. These people knew what they were doing, rotating the use of their fields and applying natural fertilisers, mostly dung and sometimes chalk or limestone, where the soil...

  West Stow. A Recreation of a Saxon village. The period after the Romans left is known as the  Dark Ages, not because they were particularly gloomy, but because we don't know much about them, so we superimpose our current ideas about how things are organised around kings, nations and regular armies. The reality was almost certainly more chaotic.  It  might be better to think of early England as being a bit like the Congo, with weak or non-existent central control and people with strong family and tribal loyalties. There would probably have been frequent informal invasions, many refugees, and a few wandering, plundering warlords. It all started with what appears to have been the takeover of much of the country by a consortium of tribes whose business plan was international expansion.  Procopius, a historian in the embers of the Roman Empire ,  referred to the inhabitants as being 'Angles, Frisians and Britons.  I alluded to this in my previous pos...

Pieter Breugel : The Land of Cockaigne :1567 Our medieval forebears dreamed about a perfect land called Cockaigne, where there were no lords and bosses, abundance made toil unnecessary, and fat geese and milch cows, rather than fear and hunger, roamed the streets. It wasn’t an English invention. The Germans had Schlaraffenland, the Irish looked to Tír na Nóg, the Dutch knew Luilekkerland and the Americans dreamed of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. This is a two-part post looking at the ways people have imagined the cities of the future. In this first section, I want to look at the prophecies of dreamers, writers and filmmakers. But dreaming is easy. It is hard enough trying to change places by, say, lobbying against a library closure or building a new road, but changing things at city scale is challenging. So in the second part I want to survey the plans of the politicians, architects and planners, starting from the beginning, who aspire to bring the dreams to life and to ask whether they...