Quite a lot of of us is likely to be interested within the opportunity to spend a day in Victorian London. However only a few of us certainly who’ve ever learn, say, a Charles Dickens novel would ever elect to dwell there. “London’s little lanes are allureing now,” says Sheehan Quirke, the host of the video above, whereas standing in one in all them, “however 150 years in the past in locations like this, you’d have had complete families crammed into these tiny rooms without running water. There would have been open cesspits spilling down the streets, and the stench of sewage boiling within the midday solar would have been unbearready.” The stinking metropolis, already the most important on the earth and developing day by day, “wasn’t solely horrible to dwell in, however genuinely dangerous.”
A lot of the tremendous quantity of waste professionalduced by Londoners went straight into the River Thames, which eventually grew so foul that the engineer Joseph Bazalgette took on the job of designing not only a sewer system, but additionally an embankment to “exchange what was essentially a stinking swamp full of rubbish and human waste and eels.” Although eminently, even miraculously functional, Bazalgette’s design wasn’t utilitarian.
After its completion in 1870, the embankment was lined with elabofeely decorated lamps (a few of the first items of electric gentleing on the earth) that also catch the attention of passersby immediately, properly into the twenty-first century. “We don’t associate decoration with reduceting-edge technology, and that’s a serious difference between us and the Victorians,” who “noticed no contradiction between startling modernity and time-honored tradition.”
Quirke turned famend as The Cultural Tutor just a few years in the past on the social media plattype then known as Twitter. His threads have cultivated the beneathstanding of relymuch less many learners a few host of subjects to do along with history, artwork, architecture, music, and design, with a watch towards the methods through which previous civilizations might have carried out them wagerter than ours does. The Victorians, for example, might have lacked modern amenities that none of us might dwell without, however they designed even their sewage pumping stations “with the identical ornamalestal exuberance as any church or palace.” Perhaps they thought their sanitation workers deserved beautiful sursphericalings; they certainly had “a way of satisfaction, a perception that what they’d carried out right here was pricewhereas, that it meant somefactor.” Curhire infrastructure, large-scale and small, is technologically superior, but virtually none of it’s price regarding, to place it delicately. Whether or not our personal civilization might return to beauty is the question on the coronary heart of Quirke’s enterprise — and one his developing group of followers has begun to ask themselves each time they step outaspect.
Related content:
Why Do People Hate Modern Architecture?: A Video Essay
Richard Feynman on Beauty
Why Dutch & Japanese Cities Are Insanely Effectively Designed (and American Cities Are Terribly Designed)
Discover The Grammar of Ornament, One of many Nice Color Books & Design Masteritems of the nineteenth Century
Dieter Rams Lists the ten Timemuch less Principles of Good Design — Backed by Music by Brian Eno
Saul Bass’ Recommendation for Designers: Make Somefactor Beautiful and Don’t Worry Concerning the Money
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
