Posts tagged history
Eoin's Stuff
Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese - toasted mostly
Inspired by another post here on Tumblr, I decided to look into the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong a bit more, it truly was one of the most amazing and terrifying places on earth. Being slightly smaller than an NFL stadium, the structure was built of 350 smaller interconnected buildings and hosted, at it’s peak, a population density of 5 million people per square mile.
To put those numbers in perspective, this would be like taking the entire population of metro Philadelphia, the 4th largest in the US, and putting it in 1 square mile instead of 1,744.
The area was also largely ungoverned and unregulated. Factories, apartments, schools, temples, churches, shops, cafes, hotels and almost anything else one could imagine were housed within the structure that never had a full blueprint of it done. Buildings were built onto buildings, expanded, rebuilt, and re-purposed as needed without a central authority of any kind.
Within the structure, natural light was almost non-existent, and an unknown number of miles of jury-rigged wires provided electricity to everything. Water constantly dripped down to the lower levels from both rain and leaking pipes, while garbage filled every passage. A constant yellow haze filled the structure and there were never any government safety inspections.
The Kowloon Walled City was demolished in the early 1990s as part of the deal that returned Hong Kong to the Chinese from the British. The entire area is now a park.
I find places like this fascinating, it is just incredible what we, humans, build and live in. This, hive, for lack of a better term, was one of the most interesting structures I’ve yet looked at.
For a documentary shot inside of the Kowloon Walled City, check here:
(via literaryflack)
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Another title I commissioned is coming out this month!
This one is a cracker of a historical crime story, The Missing Postman.
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Historivision-HV Film
Slick site this and great video on Afghanistan focused on Chrurchill’s experience there!
Churchill on the Afghan Frontier When war swept the Afghan frontier over 100 years ago, a young Winston Churchill was there to write about it. His dispatches for a London newspaper still resonate.
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Book Review: Riotous Assemblies – Rebels, Riots and Revolts in Ireland
Great review of Riotous Assemblies by John Dorney!
John Cunningham gives much food for thought in his account of how the Irish-speaking community of Lettermullen in Connemara became involved in a stand-off with the police and the coastguard in 1873, over the salvage of shipwreck. The police started off by allowing the locals, under the 1854 Salvage Act, to keep some of the salvaged goods in return for help recovering the wreck, only to change their minds halfway through and forbid them to take any washed up timber – in the end shooting 300 rounds of ammunition at the islanders who were collecting it and killing two. Two points arise here. The first, being whether it really possible to speak of ‘rule of law’ in 19th century Ireland when the authorities could simply change it when they felt it expedient. The second concerns the nature of the Irish “imagined community” at this juncture. For the police were English-speaking Irishmen and seem – in these pre-Gaelic revival days – to have regarded the Gaeltacht people not as, ‘pure Gaels’, but as “ignorant” and savage”.
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via puesoccurrences.files.wordpress.com
Love this picture and the story with it too!
