How Did The World Get So Ugly? - The Cultural Tutor Sheehan Quirke

[BootinUp]

[multigraincracker]

1. Great Cultural Anthropology study. Not that the

Victorian age was close to perfect.

I use to have doctor that had one of those old red telephone booths in his waiting room. There was a sign on it that said For Cell Phone Use. Great idea, I always disliked listening to conversations of cell phone conversations of others sitting near me.
Those old style booths could be mass produced now and even made more sound proof.
Just an observation.

[70sEraVet]

2. Seven years ago, my wife and I had the opportunity to buy a Victorian house

It may actually be more of a Queen Ann, but we call it our Victorian home. It was sadly neglected, but, on the other hand, many of the rooms seemed untouched since it was built in 1908. We have tried hard (within our budget) to retain the original flavor of the home.
One of the home's strange extavagances is that the woodwork (doors, door and window casings, baseboards, etc.) were PAINTED to look like the wood grain of different kinds of wood! The foyer is painted to look like walnut, the library looks like mahogany, the living room like burl wood, and the entire upstairs to resemble quarter-cut (tiger-striped) oak. We owned the house for a couple of months before we realized that the wood grain was painted on!

[erronis]

3. Interesting perspective - contrast between convenience (now) and beauty (then)

even in ordinary things.

I don't really like the "ornate" but I feel that our minimalist artifact have lost touch with nature.

[Warpy]

4. Sir Bazalgette has always been a hero of mine

Before he designed the present system, London had a patchwork and rudimentary system of badly pitched combination sewers and storm drains that delivered both rain ater and sewage into the Thames. In 1858, a combination of very warm weather and a tidal anomaly that kept area water more stagnant than usual combined into something called then and now "The Great Stink." The eye watering, nausea inducing stench was so bad that Parliament had to go out of session. At last, London residents and government offiicials alike were willing to put up with the expense and disruption that constructing a modern sewer system would entail.

Sir Bazalgette was definitely the man for the job. Not only was he an amazing engineer, he also overbuilt the system to handle the much larger, future London he was sure would come. He used the hardest fired brick he could find in its construction and yes, it is still beautiful, the vaulted brick ceilings over a system that has never exceeded its capacity AFAIK.

You Tube has some good videos on "The Great Stink," some of which give quick looks at Sir Bazalgette's actual sewers.