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Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
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Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#92vote
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the US the a sovereign state made up of 50 states. They used to be called that because they were independent countries There are other offenders, but the US and UK together are probably the main reason English no longer has concise but unambiguous way to refer to sovereign states
> They used to be called that because they were independent countries The latter part is true of exactly one US state (Hawaii), but otherwise false. They are called that because they are political bodies capable of international relations. The 13 founding states were British colonies; Florida, New Mexico and Texas were famously Mexican and/or Spanish colonies, and the western half of the continental states were Frenc…
I believe GP is technically correct in several ways. The first 13 states were mostly independent and sovereign under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 until 1789, when the US Constitution superseded it and established a much more significant central government.
Texas was an independent republic from 1836 until US annexation at the end of 1845. Although Mexico did not recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas, numerous other countries did.
California is more of an edge-case. It was arguably an independent republic for a few weeks in 1846. And a similar story with Florida: the Republic of West Florida existed for a couple months in 1810. But both of these cases were basically small uprisings that weren't broadly recognized by other countries.
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#94[dead]
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
The new Museum's site also has a very cool view through a window, but it's a view of the passing trains [underground], because historically that building (one of London's markets) had a freight service and of course there's no room to move a railway line under London so even though it hadn't needed a freight service for decades the passenger service over the same rails still exists and you will be able to wave to sur…
Seems like a missed opportunity to have a tube station inside the museum.
Well, not quite, these aren't tube trains, they're ThamesLink trains, so it would be a mainline railway station, not a tube station, albeit underground. And they already have more appropriate stops in London.
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#96Note this is about the City of London, an entity much smaller and older than the modern city known as London. It's land area is about 3 km^2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London Title should probably read "the City of London" rather than "London".
I had a hard time remembering that distinction when I first read about the "City of London". Here is the US, the "city of Chicago" is the same as "Chicago".
Eh. If you live in Schaumburg and someone from England asks where you live, you'd probably just say Chicago.
The Windy City does have a kind of "get out" in that people refer to the larger metro area as "Chicagoland" whereas London is still just London thirty miles out from the financial district.
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
For further confusion there are two cities within the (historical) county of London - the city of Westminster and the city of London.
Very few people on HN will have been alive when there was a county of London. It ceased to exist in the 1960s. The UK does not require this layer of subdivision to exist, so it's not that there's a different county or set of counties covering the same area now but rather there is no county. This is a contrast to say the US system where AIUI there must be a county and in some cases that county doesn't really matter (e…
Except where the USA has parishes instead of counties, just to mix it up some more.
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#98> ground level then was a few metres lower than now What?! That's huge. What happened?
Tons of cities have hidden underground streets that are the old street level and now abandoned due to all manner of modernization.
Walking around Chicago I often see houses where the front door is a couple of meters below street level because the house never moved its door to an upper story when the city was releveled.
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a hard time remembering that distinction when I first read about the "City of London". Here is the US, the "city of Chicago" is the same as "Chicago".
For further confusion, ‘London’ does not exist at all as a well defined entity and the UK has no de jure capital.
> ‘London’ does not exist at all as a well defined entity
I think it does: the territory administered by the Greater London Authority; i.e. the 32 places called "London Borough of X", plus the City.