Oil Drum Lane

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...

Moving on from the visions of writers and filmmakers to the grand schemes of politicians, architects, planners and sundry other idealists and sometimes crazy people. I am not a fan. Too much energy and time are wasted on megalomaniac schemes far removed from the needs and desires of most of the population. In the 1800s, at the behest of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann turned a pestilential and overcrowded Paris into the ‘city of light’ of the Belle Époque. But the boulevards and open spaces owe as much to the wish of authoritarian governments to make it easier to control riots. In the long run it didn’t help Napoleon much; he was deposed after France came second in the Franco-Prussian War and ended his days in southeast London.  Boulevard Montmarte   Those lessons were not forgotten when they rebuilt Berlin and Warsaw after WW2. In contrast, the English, who preferred a laissez-faire approach to grand plans, rebuilt London after the Blitz in much the same way as they had respo...

My notes on this site primarily focus on places and histories, topics about which I have some knowledge. Some of them are yoga for the imagination, for example, the attempts to visualise prehistoric landscapes and posts on exoplanets and film sets. By contrast, my aim here is to explore a boundary of what we CAN imagine about reality. Worryingly, it involves physics and maths, so I will be plumbing the depths of my ignorance as well.  The starting point is what science tells us about the reality of our universe, and to try to make sense of it. It is the difference between knowing that E=mc² and knowing that it implies that you can't exceed the speed of light.  Scientists and mathematicians tell us that there might be different realities and different dimensions. If so, what I want is to know what these parallel worlds might be like, and because I cannot understand or articulate the maths, I want a picture, a map or a credible thought experiment.  First, though, I have to ...