Think of the National Trust, and what probably comes to mind is an image of a middle-aged, middle-class couple pottering round a neo-classical pile built at vast expense by a spendthrift earl in the 18th century, and then surrendered to the Nation in lieu of inheritance tax sometime in the late 1940s. After all, its purpose is surely to preserve historically significant houses and gardens for the enjoyment and education of the general public.
Well, it seems not. Seek out the National Trust’s Strategy to 2025, and the first words you read are: “Our 21st-century ambition is to meet the needs of an environment under pressure, and the challenges and expectations of a fast-moving world … Underpinning this is our renewed commitment to diversity and inclusion and playing our part to create a fair, equal society, free from discrimination.”
In their “10-year Vision”, written in the same hideous identikit jargon, they talk about a “revolutionary” move away from the “outdated mansion experience”. The Trust provides little evidence that stately homes are becoming less popular; reading between the lines the main problem that the Vision’s authors seem to have with the English country house is that it is old and traditional and popular with comfortably-off white people.
I don’t particularly want to get stuck into the National Trust. But they do provide a particularly interesting example of a problem afflicting institutions in modern Britain, namely the relentless politicisation of parts of life which should represent an escape from politics.
Niall Gooch, “What is the point of the National Trust?”, UnHerd, 2020-10-19.
July 18, 2026
QotD: Britain’s National Trust wants to eliminate the “outdated mansion experience”
June 29, 2026
“The state of 24 Sussex Dr. [is] a painfully obvious symbol of broader Canadian dysfunction”
For the vast majority of my readers, the address “24 Sussex Drive” might as well be “99 Sunset Strip” or “12 Grimmault Place”, but it’s a real place with some minor importance to Canadians: it’s the official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada. It’s also, famously, a dump (rather like the country has been allowed to become). It finally reached the point of structural decrepitude that the current and previous PMs never bothered to move in. Now, as related in the free-to-cheapskates portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, it’s supposed to be renovated.
The official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada, 24 Sussex Drive, as seen from the Ottawa River. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (La résidence officielle du Premier ministre du Canada 24, promenade Sussex vu de la rivière des Outaouais).
Photo by sookie via Wikimedia Commons.
Hallelujah.
We’re responding to the announcement on Friday that the Canadian government will finally deal with the mess that is 24 Sussex Dr., the official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada (at least in theory). Successive Canadian prime ministers have refused to spend the money necessary to keep the building, which dates to the 1860s, in a state of good repair. PM after PM has been too terrified of the optics of spending taxpayer money on their own mansion.
Rather than solve this problem like a grown-up country by pushing control of a reasonable maintenance budget to a non-political body — something like the National Capital Commission, come to think of it — we instead simply sat around and allowed the building to decay to the point where it was no longer habitable. Stephen Harper and his family gritted their way through their time there. Justin Trudeau and his family never bothered moving in, settling instead at Rideau Cottage, on the grounds of the Governor General’s residence.
Mark Carney, God bless him, has decided that enough is enough and it’s time to bite the bullet and just fix the damn thing.
We repeat: hallelujah.
We are actually fairly agnostic on one of the central debates here, namely whether the mansion should have been rehabilitated or simply knocked down and replaced. You can make the argument fairly either way. In making his announcement on Friday, Carney indicated that he had chosen rehabilitation because Canadians need to do more to stand up for their heritage and their history, and that includes 24 Sussex.
That struck us as an astute reading of where public sentiment is, and a way to buy at least partial political cover for what will remain controversial.
We were less impressed by the rest of what he announced. Instead of simply hiring a reputable firm to come up with a new design for the renovated building, getting some quotes and then proceeding directly, the government will instead dramatically overcomplicate things, as Canadian governments tend to do, by commissioning some kind of design competition to be overseen by eminent Canadian designers and architects. We wouldn’t be shocked if David Johnston shows up somehow. Louise Arbour is, of course, recently spoken for, but we’ll see if any other retired Supreme Court justices end up giving their design skills a whirl.
Renovated building this way is dumb. But we think the next part of what was announced was weirder, and certainly riskier for the government. To offset the costs, this will become something the government fundraises for.
Okay. We guess?
Hey, The Line has no problem with fundraising. (Ahem. See below.) But we aren’t a national government? The devil will be in the details here. If this is structured in a way that limits donations to Canadian citizens and residents, caps donations at a set dollar value, and includes strong transparency requirements, we guess it’s fine. Canadians have been feeling patriotic of late, especially boomers and Liberals. If the prime minister has figured out a way to offload the financing of this project onto them, we’ll find a way to live with that.
Gosh, there’s risk here. Will foreign donations be permitted? Corporations? If corporations are allowed, must they be Canadian? Will Canadian subsidiaries of foreign corporations be able to contribute? What about foreign governments? Will the future dining room of the official residence of the prime minister of Canada be brought to you by the People’s Republic of China? Will the front foyer be a gift of the people of Qatar?
We’ll see. Those details are still pending. We suspect, or at least hope, that the government was smart enough to foresee the optics of having the prime minister’s official residence sponsored by Brookfield Asset Management, to pick one example out of thin air.
So we don’t love the process, but we love that we’re at least doing this. The state of 24 Sussex Dr. has not only been a long-standing national embarrassment, it’s been a painfully obvious symbol of broader Canadian dysfunction. Taking care of the damn house, or fixing it or replacing it, is a really easy thing by the standards of the problems the federal government is often faced with. But both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau curled up into tiny little balls and melted into jelly instead of just doing their jobs and taking care of a national infrastructure asset. That they did this simply to avoid the optics of spending a little money on themselves and future prime ministers is easily understood through the lens of politics, but no less pathetic for it.
For the record, I have no problem with the government spending the money to maintain or even upgrade the PM’s official residence, but it’s been a political liability for so long that fixing the place up will likely be far more expensive than any amount of deferred maintenance might have cost if we’d just committed to keeping the place in good condition. I’ve always been puzzled why it isn’t in the purview of the National Capital Commision anyway, so that it wouldn’t become a cheap political point-scoring opportunity every time it springs a leak or needs a window pane replaced.
The Line editors also declare they’re on Team Art Deco against the anti-human monsters of Brutalist architecture and point out that there actually is a uniquely Canadian architectural style:
Look, if the decline of 24 Sussex had become symbolic of Canadian vices like dysfunction and cheapness, there was an opportunity here to signal symbolic virtues like decisiveness and seriousness by just — announcing the government was going to fix a known problem using an architect that Carney had personally approved. There is absolutely no reason to use this building as an opportunity to create a travelling roadshow of the country’s architectural “greatness” by holding a design competition that will produce 15 different varieties of the AGO Crystal or the Edmonton Public Tank/Library. To be blunt, this country’s talent pool in architecture is as shallow as every other cultural industry we can name. It can be summed up thusly; we produce the odd star in the field who moves elsewhere. What gets left behind is derivative government-funded schlock that allows us to keep up appearances and maintain our national illusions. Our ability to create world class art of any kind at present is right up there with our ability to build a pipeline, scale a company, or manage an efficient regulatory process. Our decline is a universal problem.
“Chateau Laurier, 1927 with the new extenstion” by Ross Dunn is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
.
Meanwhile, Canada already has a unique and rich architectural style that we should be using on all federal buildings intended to convey authority and heritage — it goes by many names, ranging from Railway Gothic, to neo-Chateau. It can be seen in beloved buildings ranging from the University of Toronto’s Hart House, to the aforementioned railway hotels that spread across the land. It’s turn of the century gothic revival meets French Chateaux and Scottish Kirk; romantic, a little ornate, and always grounded in the landscape and climate, and using the local materials. In other words, we already have a uniquely Canadian aesthetic language. We just stopped designing buildings this way when our cultural institutions decided that our history was a problem rather than the prima materia of our complicated national identity. We’ve been stuck with glass buildings and cheap concrete Soviet suicide boxes ever since.
And to be clear, we don’t think every Canadian building needs to look like it was built in 1919. Form ought to meet function. For buildings that are trying to convey modern values, or to align with environments sporting an updated aesthetic, there’s nothing wrong with a modern style. Museums and art galleries, for example, offer fine opportunities to push artistic envelopes. But when we’re considering buildings intended to convey government power, institutional authority, and the establishment of democratic legitimacy through continuation and heritage, that’s when we ought to be leaning back into our shared historic design languages. That’s the time to convey gravitas, solidity, and confidence; stone, ornate woodwork, traditional aspects and classical symmetry.
An updated version of Railway style, working in tandem with the existing structure of 24 Sussex, is the very obvious answer to the problem of the Prime Minister’s residence. If we can incorporate First Nations motifs or building materials, all the better.
But this country’s current architectural culture is profoundly derivative and fundamentally uncomfortable with the very institutional heritage this building needs to convey. Restrained and old fashioned is not the kind of thing that wins international acclaim. So instead, what we’re going to get is the generic, omnipresent, and pathologically insecure style better defined as “Modern Canadian Try Hard”. Think updated farmhouse, black window frames and white walls à la Studio McGee. Wavy glass Eurotrash that makes no sense for the climate of Canada and offers no gesture toward the symbolic value of the building.
April 8, 2026
Architectural nostalgia in our hyper-bland modern world
Freddie deBoer considers the all-too-frequent social media wave of real or performative nostalgia for the more appealing styles of older buildings followed by the inevitable anti-nostalgic backlash:
There’s a meme, of sorts, that pops up on Twitter from time to time: why don’t we build beautiful buildings anymore? The sentiment is associated with a more general yearning for the past, the kind that asserts that America or Western civilization or human culture are in decline. There certainly must be a lot of people who harbor similar concerns, as evidenced by how these tweets tend to rack up thousands of “likes”. They’ll share a picture of some beautiful old building — Art Deco classics like the Chrysler Building are common, but also Gothic buildings, and neoclassical, and others — and ask why we don’t, or can’t, or won’t make beautiful buildings anymore. They’ll point to the aesthetic qualities of older buildings, remind us that we have vastly more advanced technology and are far richer today than when those beautiful buildings were built, and wonder why we don’t build for beauty these days.
Why are so many new fancy buildings generic and forgettable works of brushed steel and glass? Why so many new ordinary buildings cookie-cutter rectilinear jobs, almost entirely free of embellishment or decoration, all flat roofs and sharp edges, and neutral in both color and effect? Why do they all look like … that? You know what I mean by “that”. Sometimes the style is referred to as Late International or The Glass Box Style, but perhaps the term Value-Engineered Modernism is more apt. Whatever you call it, this kind of building is the architectural equivalent of a default font, a soul-crushing assembly line of sterile glass monoliths that erases local identity in favor of the numbing, cookie-cutter uniformity of global bureaucracy. It’s the corporation in building form.
As is true with all social media phenomena, there is a counter-chorus, and it expresses itself in condescending, sighing, superior tones. Part of this is related to the fact that the accounts lamenting the death of public aesthetics are often right-coded; certainly a lot of the complaints are coming from Twitter users with Greek statues for profile pictures. And really, any sentiment that’s repeated often enough on social media will attract mockery in time. But a good deal of the derision comes from the online side of the YIMBY movement, which in the last decade or so has become something like the caricature mainstream Dems made of the Bernie Sanders online army back in 2016 — that is, snarky, self-righteous, and fundamentally concerned with achieving in-group status through the mechanism of arguing about politics. YIMBYs are an imperfect but important force in a country that desperately needs to build more housing and which has all manner of stupid and sclerotic zoning rules. It’s generically true, though, that the more online you get the less useful any given political movement becomes, and Twitter YIMBYs seem absolutely attached to representing all of the worst elements of that group — they’re incurious, rude, reductive, averse to basic best practices of messaging, and above all else, tribal. (Politics gets stupid when politics becomes a way to belong rather than a way to to do things.) And they’ll have you know that lamenting the death of beautiful buildings is dumb, lol lol lol lol.
The Twitter YIMBYs tend to treat concern for aesthetics as a decadent demand in a world where we need to JUST BUILD. And their particular tactic is to insist that we don’t build attractive buildings anymore because doing so is just too expensive, and really, what’s more important, the unconquerable human desire to live surrounded by beauty, or our need to put people in homes??? Case closed! But not really. It turns out that it’s simply not true that building stylish and ornamented buildings is relatively more expensive today than it was in eras past. Read all about it. Yes, Baumol’s cost disease is real, and construction is a manpower-intensive industry, but almost a century after the Empire State Building was erected, we’ve got the benefit of modern logistics and supply chains and automated production of essential parts and so on. The cost of labor cannot explain the death of decoration in modern building design. And increasingly, there seems to be an acknowledgment that it’s easier to move the public to accept new construction when said new construction is inspiring. King YIMBY Matt Yglesias had a good post on this recently; as he says, we can look at the premium people will pay to live in townhouse neighborhoods where most of the construction happened 100+ years ago as a clue to what people actually like. Housing is expensive in both Park Slope and Hudson Yards, but there’s no question that the former is an aspirational bourgie vision that has stood the test of time while the latter is barely tolerated. And aesthetics plays a large role in that.
We’re wired to pursue beauty. We are not, however, wired to pursue authenticity.
February 22, 2026
QotD: The shift from “motte-and-bailey” construction to stone castles
To talk about how these designs work, we need to clear some terminology. The (typically thin) wall that runs the circuit of the castle and encloses the bailey is called a “curtain wall“. In stone castles, there may be multiple curtain walls, arranged concentrically (a design that seems to emerge in the Near East and makes its way to Europe in the 13th century via the crusades); the outermost complete circuit (the primary wall, as it were) is called the enceinte. Increasingly, the keep in stone castles is moved into the bailey (that is, it sits at the center of the castle rather than off to one side), although of course stone versions of motte and bailey designs exist. In some castle design systems, with stone the keep itself drops away, since the stone walls and towers often provided themselves enough space to house the necessary peacetime functions; in Germany there often was no keep (that is, no core structure that contained the core of the fortified house), but there often was a bergfriede, a smaller but still tall “fighting tower” to serve the tactical role of the keep (an elevated, core position of last-resort in a defense-in-depth arrangement) without the peacetime role.
While the wooden palisade curtain walls of earlier motte and bailey castles often lacked many defensive features (though sometimes you’d have towers and gatehouses to provide fighting positions around the gates), stone castles tend to have lots of projecting towers which stick out from the curtain wall. The value of projecting towers is that soldiers up on those towers have clear lines of fire running down the walls, allowing them to target enemies at the base of the curtain wall (the term for this sort of fire is “enfilade” fire – when you are being hit in the side). Clearly what is being envisaged here is the ability to engage enemies doing things like undermining the base of walls or setting up ladders or other scaling devices.
The curtain walls themselves also become fighting positions. Whether on a tower or on the wall itself, the term for the fighting position at the top is a “battlement”. Battlements often have a jagged “tooth” pattern of gaps to provide firing positions; the term for the overall system is crenellation; the areas which have stone are merlons, while the gaps to fire through are crenals. The walkway behind both atop the wall is the chemin de ronde, allure or “wall-walk”. One problem with using the walls themselves as fighting positions is that it is very hard to engage enemies directly beneath the wall or along it without leaning out beyond the protection of the wall and exposing yourself to enemy fire. The older solution to this were wooden, shed-like projections from the wall called “hoarding”; these were temporary, built when a siege was expected. During the crusades, European armies encountered Near Eastern fortification design which instead used stone overhangs (with the merlons on the outside) with gaps through which one might fire (or just drop things) directly down at the base of the wall; these are called machicolations and were swiftly adopted to replace hoardings, since machicolations were safer from both literal fire (wood burns, stone does not) and catapult fire, and also permanent. All of this work on the walls and the towers is designed to allow a small number of defenders to exchange fire effectively with a large number of attackers, and in so doing to keep those attackers from being able to “set up shop” beneath the walls.
[I]t is worth noting something about the amount of fire being developed by these projecting towers: the goal is to prevent the enemy operating safely at the wall’s base, not to prohibit approaches to the wall. These defenses simply aren’t designed to support that much fire, which makes sense: castle garrisons were generally quite small, often dozens or a few hundred men. While Hollywood loves sieges where all of the walls of the castle are lined with soldiers multiple ranks deep, more often the problem for the defender was having enough soldiers just to watch the whole perimeter around the clock (recall the example at Antioch: Bohemond only needs one traitor to access Antioch because one of its defensive towers was regularly defended by only one guy at night). It is actually not hard to see that merely by looking at the battlements: notice in the images here so far often how spaced out the merlons of the crenellation are. The idea here isn’t maximizing fire for a given length of wall but protecting a relatively small number of combatants on the wall. As we’ll see, that is a significant design choice: castle design assumes the enemy will reach the walls and aims to prevent escalade once they are there; later in this series we’ll see defenses designed to prohibit effective approach itself.
As with the simpler motte and bailey, stone castles often employ a system of defense in depth to raise the cost of an attack. At minimum, generally, that system consists of a moat (either wet or dry), the main curtain walls (with their towers and gatehouses) and then a central keep. Larger castles, especially in the 13th century and beyond, adopting cues from castle design in the Levant (via the crusades) employed multiple concentric rings of walls. Generally these were set up so that the central ring was taller, either by dint of terrain (as with a castle set on a hill) or by building taller walls, than the outer ring. The idea here seems not to be stacking fire on approaching enemies, but ensuring that the inner ring could dominate the outer ring if the latter fell to attackers; defenders could fire down on attackers who would lack cover (since the merlons of the outer ring would face the other way). As an aside, the concern to be firing down is less about the energy imparted by a falling arrow (though this is more meaningful with javelins or thrown rocks) and more about a firing position that denies enemies cover by shooting down at them (think about attackers, for instance, crossing a dry moat – if your wall is the right height and the edges of the moat are carefully angled, you can set up a situation where the ditch never actually offers the attackers any usable cover, but you need to be high up to do it!).
Speaking of the moat, this is a common defensive element (essentially just a big ditch!) which often gets left out of pop culture depictions of castles and siege warfare, but it accomplishes so many things at such a low cost premium. Even assuming the moat is “dry”! For attackers on foot (say, with ladders) looking to approach the wall, the moat is an obstacle that slows them down without potentially providing any additional cover (it is also likely to disorder an attack). For sappers (attackers looking to tunnel under the walls and then collapse the tunnel to generate a breach), the depth of the ditch forces them to dig deeper, which in turn raises the demands in both labor and engineering to dig their tunnel. For any attack with siege engines (towers, rams, or covered protective housings made so that the wall can be approached safely), the moat is an obstruction that has to be filled in before those engines can move forward – a task which in turn broadcasts the intended route well in advance, giving the defenders a lot of time to prepare.
Well-built stone castles of this sort were stunningly resistant to assault, even with relatively small garrisons (dozens or a few hundred, not thousands). That said, building them was very expensive; maintaining them wasn’t cheap either. For both castles and fortified cities, one ubiquitous element in warfare of the period (and in the ancient period too, by the by) was the rush when war was in the offing to repair castle and town walls, dig out the moat and to clear buildings that during peace had been built int he firing lines of the castle or city walls.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.
February 1, 2026
The Agora of Athens | A Historical Tour
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 3 Oct 2025The Agora was the political and economic heart of ancient Athens. This tour explores its long history and evocative ruins.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:47 Bouleuterion
1:44 Tholos
2:22 Monument of the Eponymous Heroes
2:56 Temple of Hephaestus
5:28 The Hellenistic Agora
6:16 Stoa of Attalos
6:57 Augustus and the Agora
8:06 Odeon of Agrippa
9:26 Herulian Wall
10:56 Overview
January 10, 2026
A Short Tour of Roman London
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 19 Sept 2025The ruins of Londinium – London’s Roman predecessor – are not spectacular. But they are extremely interesting …
0:00 Introduction
0:40 City walls
1:47 St. Magnus the Martyr
2:26 Monument to the Great Fire
3:12 Leadenhall Market
4:10 London Mithraeum
6:19 Bank of England
7:08 Guildhall Amphitheater
8:14 The Gherkin
December 7, 2025
History Summarized: Quebec’s Architectural Memory
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 1 Aug 2025Congratulations, you just got Chateau’d.
Ten years ago I visited Quebec City with my dad, this summer the two of us went back, and today I bring you the analytical fruits of a visit well spent. (Let it be known I did my best attempt at Quebecois, recalling pronunciation differences like Frontenac condensing to “Frotnak”, but otherwise defaulting to Metropolitan French when I wasn’t sure of local pronunciations. Alas, any attempt to “split the difference” between Quebecois and Metropolitan French will invariably result in utter disaster. For this, je suis désolé.)
(more…)
December 2, 2025
QotD: Brutalism “is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful”
I have long suspected, but cannot prove with an indisputable argument, that this architecture has played its part in the brutalization of daily life and social behavior in the country. Certainly, it has dehumanized the appearance of many towns and cities; its harsh surfaces and willfully austere and jagged designs leave the mere human being feeling that he is about as welcome as an ant on a kitchen counter — which, indeed, he now much resembles.
This architecture is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful, not despite the fact that so many people detest it, but because so many people detest it. They are like the doctors of old, who, if they could not cure their patients, could at least make them take the most repellent and noxious medicine, on the grounds that a little bit of what revolts you does you good.
The projected museum is in a former school in the north of London, designed in 1968. Here is fairly typical commentary on the building:
Despite decades of wear and some unfortunate interventions, the raw concrete structure has remained a cherished example of socially driven modernist design.
It is to be noticed that the cherishing done here is independent of anyone who cherishes; as for “socially driven modernist design”, we might read “totalitarian”. Indeed, the building exudes totalitarianism, as raw reinforced concrete exudes ghastly stains after a short time.
Le Corbusier, one of the founders of this kind of architecture, was indeed a fascist in the most literal sense, though he had no real objection to communist totalitarianism, either. What he most hated was what he called the street, that is to say the place where people behave spontaneously and without direction from above, and where they are not corralled into functions imposed on them by all-wise socially driven architects. It was for this reason that he and his acolytes preferred to build urban wildernesses of the kind that have now been built the world over, but especially in Britain.
The architects who have been given the task of renewing the school building where the museum dedicated to architectural brutalism is to be housed have “noted its distinct geometry, as well as its symbolic presence reflecting the ideals of the school’s broader 1960s Brutalist architecture conceived in an era of social progress”.
Apologists for such architecture write a pure Soviet langue de bois — or perhaps I should say langue de béton, since concrete rather than wood is their favorite material:
Consultation with the school, families and local stakeholders has underpinned the project from the outset, ensuring that the building’s next chapter remains tied to its founding ethos centered on architecture as a tool for collective learning and expression.
Does anyone, after the death of the late, not much lamented, Leonid Brezhnev, have thoughts that correspond to, or are couched in, words such as these? By their language shall ye know them.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Architects of Our Own Destruction”, New English Review, 2025-08-08.
May 24, 2025
QotD: Comparing living standards and technology between the Roman period and medieval western Europe
While I am convinced that the evidence suggests there was a drop in living standards and some loss of technology in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, most of that drop was fairly short-lived. But exactly when development in medieval Europe meets and then exceeds the same for antiquity (typically we’re comparing the second century height of the Roman Empire) also depends on exactly what kind of measure is being used.
If the question, for instance, is agricultural productivity on a per capita basis (the most important component of per capita economic production), medieval Europe probably moves ahead of the Roman Empire fairly quickly with the introduction of better types of plow and widespread use of watermills for grinding grain. My understanding is that by c. 1000 AD, watermills show up fairly frequently in things like monastic charters, suggesting they were reasonably widespread (the Romans used watermills too, though their spread was uneven) and by that point, plow technology had also moved forward, mostly through the development of plow types better suited to Europe’s climate. So as best we can tell, the farmer of c. 1000 AD had better tools than his Roman predecessors and probably had such for some time.
If the question is technology and engineering, once again what you see depends on where you look. Some technologies don’t appear to have regressed much, if at all, ironworking being one example where it seems like little to nothing was lost. On the other hand, in western Europe, the retreat in architecture is really marked and it is hard to say when you would judge the new innovations (like flying buttresses) to have equaled some of the lost ones (like concrete); certainly the great 12th/13th century Cathedrals (e.g. Notre Dame, the Duomo di Sienna and I suppose the lesser Duomo di Firenze, if we must include it) seem to me to have matched or exceeded all but perhaps the biggest Roman architectural projects. Though we have to pause here because in many cases the issue was less architectural know-how (though that was a factor) as state capacity: the smaller and more fragmented states of the European Middle Ages didn’t have the resources the Roman Empire did.
If one instead looks for urbanization and population as the measure of development, the Middle Ages looks rather worse. First and Second century Rome is probably unmatched in Europe until the very late 1700s, early 1800s, when first London (c. 1800) and Paris (c. 1835) reach a million. So one looking for matches for the large cities and magnificent municipal infrastructure of the Romans will have rather a long wait. Overall population is much more favorable as a measurement to the Middle Ages. France probably exceeds its highest Roman population (c. 9m) by or shortly after 1000AD, Italy (c. 7.5m) by probably 1200; Spain is the odd one out, with Roman Hispania (est. 7.5m) probably only matched in the early modern period. So for most of the Middle Ages you are looking at a larger population, but also a more rural one. That’s not necessarily bad though; pre-modern cities were hazardous places due to sanitation and disease; such cities had a markedly higher mortality, for instance. On the flip-side, fewer, smaller cities means less economic specialization.
So one’s answer often depends very much on what one values most. For my own part, I’d say by 1000 or 1100 we can very safely say the “recovery” phase of the Middle Ages is clearly over (and I think you could make an argument for setting this point substantially earlier but not meaningfully later), though even this is somewhat deceptive because it implies that no new technological ground was being broken before then, which is not true. But the popular conception that the whole of the Middle Ages reflects a retreat from the standards of antiquity is to be discarded.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: August 6, 2021: Feelings at the Fall of the Republic, Ancient and Medieval Living Standards, and Zombies!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-08-06.
May 17, 2025
QotD: Suburbs and their critics
It gets a lot of bad press, it has got a lot of influential haters, ridiculers and deriders. There are the urbanists, the town planners, the architects, most of whom can’t abide the sprawl. It’s ugly, inefficient, unsustainable, it lacks amenities and it lacks a sense of community, it prioritises – or privileges, as they would say – cars over pedestrians, it wastes space and it wastes resources, it’s barbaric. Those much smarter and more creative than us have offered a lot of alternatives: high-density living, modernist spaces, Le Corbusier’s houses as “machines for living”. They tore down the slums and erected high rise projects, council flats, banlieues and osiedla. They designed and built whole new districts, rich in concrete and wide bare expanses of public space.
Then there are the cultural as opposed to professional haters, and they too are as old as the suburbs themselves. The sprawl is a prison, a conformist hell. It deadens imagination and stifles creativity. It’s full of dumb people leading dumb lives. It’s a triumph of materialism, selfishness and narrow mindedness over selflessness, community and commonweal. From literature through movies and music to TV shows, suburbs don’t get a break; they are the hotbed of reaction, sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, intolerance, prejudice, oppression and kitsch. “Revolutionary Road”, “Stepford Wives”, “American Beauty”, “Weeds”, “Little Boxes”, Stephen King novels, the list is endless, but you get the drift.
There are many differences between the suburbanites and the suburbs haters, but the one big one is this: the suburbanities are the live-and-let-live crowd – they know what they like but they don’t give a shit if you don’t like it. It’s your business and it’s your life – you can do whatever you like. The suburbs haters, on the other hand, not only know what they like but they believe that everyone else should like it to, and if they don’t, tough luck, they should be forced to change for the sake of what’s really good for them and for the whole community. Suburbs are not something that can be tolerated as an option; they should be destroyed, land reclaimed, ideally by nature, their former residents corralled and concentrated.
In many ways it’s yet another example of the old elite versus the masses cultural clash. The masses essentially just want to be left alone. The elites want to remake the whole world so it accords to their vision of what’s good and useful. The masses’ is not to question why …
Arthur Chrenkoff, “In praise of sprawl”, Daily Chrenk, 2020-05-21.
January 18, 2025
QotD: On Auguste Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid
“For three thousand years architects designed buildings with columns shaped as female figures. At last Rodin pointed out that this was work too heavy for a girl. He didn’t say, ‘Look, you jerks, if you must do this, make it a brawny male figure’. No, he showed it. This poor little caryatid has fallen under the load. She’s a good girl — look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, not blaming anyone, not even the gods … and still trying to shoulder her load, after she’s crumpled under it.
“But she’s more than good art denouncing bad art; she’s a symbol for every woman who ever shouldered a load too heavy. But not alone women — this symbol means every man and woman who ever sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude, until they crumpled under their loads. It’s courage, […] and victory.”
“‘Victory’?”
“Victory in defeat; there is none higher. She didn’t give up […] she’s still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She’s a father working while cancer eats away his insides, to bring home one more pay check. She’s a twelve-year old trying to mother her brothers and sisters because Mama had to go to Heaven. She’s a switchboard operator sticking to her post while smoke chokes her and fire cuts off her escape. She’s all the unsung heroes who couldn’t make it but never quit.
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961.
December 5, 2024
Look at Life – The City’s for Living In (1968)
Classic Vehicle Channel
Published Apr 19, 2020Traffic was still an issue in the 60’s. Residents discuss how they can divert to traffic from the city. This film features great archive of city traffic in the late 60s
November 25, 2024
QotD: Le Corbusier
But most bureaucrats aren’t evil, just ignorant … and as Scott shows, this ignorance isn’t really their fault. They don’t know what they don’t know, because they can’t know. Very few bureaucratic cock-ups are as blatant as Chandigarh, where all anyone has to do is look at pictures for five minutes to conclude “you couldn’t pay me enough to move there”.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
November 17, 2024
Three (more) Forgotten Roman Megaprojects
toldinstone
Published Jul 19, 2024This video explores another three forgotten Roman megaprojects: the colossal gold mines at Las Médulas, Spain; the Anastasian Wall, Constantinople’s outer defense; and Rome’s artificial harbor at Portus.
Chapters:
0:00 Las Médulas
3:13 The Anastasian Wall
5:24 Portus
(more…)
November 14, 2024
Following the Longest Roman Aqueduct
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published Jul 19, 2024Tunisia’s Zaghouan Aqueduct, built to serve Carthage in the second century, is among the longest and most impressive of all Roman aqueducts. This video follows the aqueduct from the monumental fountain at its source to the grandiose baths at its terminus.
Historic tours with toldinstone: https://toldinstone.com/trips/
Check out my other channels, @toldinstone and @toldinstonefootnotes
