The meaning behind the site |
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man who is travelling and does not yet know the city awaiting him along
his route, wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill,
the theater, the bazaar. In every city of the empire every building is different
and set in a different order: but as soon as the stranger arrives at the
unkown city and his eye penetrates the pine cone of pagodas and garrets
and haymows, following the scrawl of canals, gardens, rubbish heaps, he
immediately distinguishes which are the prince’s palaces, the high
priests’ temples, the tavern, the prison, the slum. This-some say-confirms
the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences,
a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill
it up. Italo Calvino - Cities and Desires |
Cities
and Desires is a novel by Italo Calvino about the stories of Marco Polo
detailing some of Europe’s finest cities to the mongol warlord Kublai
Khan; but the trick to Polo’s stories is that they were always about
the city of Venice. He was paid fabulously to visit the world and give accounts
of these cities. Whenever he returned to the warlord (having never been
to any of the cities) he would conjour up great stories of Europe’s
cities, but all the while they were tales of Venice. My initial take on this story was to travel far and wide and report on cities that I had never been to. Although upon looking at a map of London streets I realised I knew just as little about my own area of London let alone some far off country. This website contains page 86 and 87 of the London A to Z and my quest to visit every single corner of every single grid square and document it. I wanted to make the information avaliable to everyone and so I have created an easy to use website that permits you to see a snippit of London so that you might discover that little bit extra about London.. |
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