Humphrey

Seen better days, but by all accounts it's looking better now than it has been for decades due to regeneration. Apparently it used to look like Germany did just after World War Two.

Well, last time I went there I was taken to a place with 112 beers on tap (think it was called the Sunset Grill), so it's officially my favourite city. If you think the Green Line is bad at rush hour you should see the tube these days. WAY too many people in London.

Ha, no way; never thought I would see this town on here. That is the pub I go drinking in when I'm over in the U.S of A. It's actually pretty good, although there is a pub in Ashburham now so my allegiance will probably switch there.

Funnily enough I have heard of this place because it was the hometown of the infamous Dr Crippin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawley_Harvey_Crippen They should put a museum in that old opera house building or something.

This was what I was most curious about, the origin of the gables, that unique slope of the roof. I think the roof you are reffering to is a Gambrel Roof which is quite common in a lot of English architecture. This was an idea we nicked off the Flemish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish_people (present day belgium), so its not a Dutch feature as such. You find it as a feature in the Dutch revival style but it wouldn't have been used in the New Netherland colony. Again these types of features were very common in East Anglia because of the wool trade and substancial cross cultural communication with the Low Counties where a lot of these styles originated. A good example of this would be the Pilgrim Fathers who moved to the Low Countries before voyaging to America on the Mayflower.

I am obliged to give my 2 cents here as I grew up in East Anglia in a little village called Cavendish and I have lived there most of my life (now based in London Town). My wife is American and comes from a gritty mill town in Massachusetts so I visit New England once a year. It goes without saying that East Anglia is an enormously important region in the context of American history. The region where I grew up was the source of most of the immigrants for the puritan great migration of the 17th century. Winthrop came from a village called Groton to the south of me. To the north a certain Thomas Paine grew up in a village called Thetford, later he was to have a massive impact on world history and die in obscurity.The majority of the housing stock in new England has its roots in Dutch and English styles. The houses and meeting halls when they were first built were identical to those found in East Anglia (see Higham meeting house (http://libraries.mit.edu/rvc/kidder/photos/MA41.html) for one of the last surviving examples). The salt box style for instance was invented in Kent and East Anglia, it isn't a native architectural style. East Anglia in turn was heavily influenced by the Dutch due to cultural interchange from the wool trade so a lot of the features you see in New England and East Anglian houses have Dutch influences, notably the dutch gables you see everywhere in New England. The fact New England houses use so much wood isn't surprising when you look at East Anglian houses and see that most of them have timber frames. The settlement patterns of New England settlements are also very similar to East Anglian settlements as they are often clustered around a village green. In the past this was primarily used as common land for animals but in the nineteenth century they became the village centrepiece. Big changes came in English and American architecture when the classical style was brought to Britain by Inigo Jones in the 16th and 17th centuries. This revolutionised vernacular architecture and classical form and symmetry became all important. In America you see this most prominantly in the federal style of architecture. In Britain the many houses and commercial buildings were given classical fa cedes (a lot of them have now been stripped off to reveal the Tudor fronting) Today there are still many continuities between East Anglian and new England building styles but also many divergences which have occurred over the passage of time as new trends in architecture have taken hold. The churches in New England I find the most interesting as they are all based on the designs that Sir Christopher Wren and Gibbs produced in the 17th century. There are similar churches that were built by Wren all over post-great fire London and the style spread like wildfire in America. If you are interested in East Anglia, here are some of the local towns to me where I grew up. Lavenham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavenham This was a boom town during the medieval wool trade, the trade collapsed and it became a backwater but it was well preserved. Cavendish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish,_Suffolk This is the village I grew up in Clarke http://www.clare-uk.com/photos/centre.html My local town, again it was a Wool trade boom town that fell on hard times. Used to be an important regional centre. Long Melford http://www.longmelford.co.uk/ This is a medieval strip development along what was historically a very important road. It is now famous for antiques, although now the dollar is so weak business is not good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salisbury http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrewsbury http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford Some more nice English towns from the medieval period

This is a great place to visit. I'd also recommend Salisbury, Chester, Shrewsbury and Winchester. These places were important during the medieval and Tudor period but never industrialised to any significant level. Hence the Victorians never knocked down/remodelled the centre and they have been pretty well preserved. You may find the odd 60s brutalist atrocity but on the whole they look very good indeed.

If you hadn't used the words "loo", "ghastly" and "prowess", I'd have thought from this statement that you were living in suburban Cincinnati and not London. Lol. Don't get me wrong, I live in an inner suburb of London which is quite gritty and is only a few neighbourhoods along from Camden and Kings Cross which is grit central, so I would consider myself an urbanite. Rightly or wrongly, my impression of the city was that outside the confines of the baroque centre the majority of neighbourhoods are quite ugly but also fairly homogeneous. In fairness, the same is true of a lot of European cities. Vast estates of concrete tower blocks, characterless suburban sprawl and large areas of low rise industrial estates. The countryside there is as flat as a pancake which doesn't help. Of course, I may just have been in a bad mood.

Thanks funny, I just got back from here last night (I was staying up in an apartment on the shores of Lake Como). On the face of it this is a very attractive city. The cathedral in the central part is the best I have seen with amazing detailing. Some might say its overdecorated but the amount of statues on the flying buttresses and the tower is staggering. The area around the cathedral is very impressive, with baroque façades and triumphal arch motifs a plenty. I didn't see much medieval stuff which leads me to suspect that it was all pulled down and replaced with Parisian style boulevards around the time of Baron Hausmann The main station was also impressive, looks like it was built in the 1930s and it has some great art deco features. You can also see in the photos that the old trams are still running. Great city to go walk around it, having said that I wouldn't want to live there!. The suburbs are ghastly, and the commie block salesman obviously had a great run of business. The central part is amazing architecturally but a tad run down, dirty and chaotic and beyond the baroque part it starts to look very sketchy. I was also accosted by bands of immigrants who hang round in the central square trying to extort money from tourists. Get in, see the Duomo the castle and the baroque centre, then get out as fast as you can. The other thing is, make sure you don't have to go to the loo while you are there. The Italians may have mastered art, architecture and wine making but when it comes to toilets, a hole in the ground is the height of their engineering prowess.