SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

[noodlenoggin]

I love how "remodelled in 1770" isn't really that old...only six years older than the birth of the US!

Around here, "old" is like the Berkeley Plantation, first settled in 1619, cleaned out by the indians, resettled in 1690 or so, and the house built in the 1730's or so. The whole thing is a tourist attraction, a national historical site, etc:



And all of that some 300 years after your local insurance agency was built. Sheesh!

Sorry for the hijack, Mr. Wolf-tona.

[sv-wolf]

I love how "remodelled in 1770" isn't really that old...only six years older than the birth of the US!

Around here, "old" is like the Berkeley Plantation, first settled in 1619, cleaned out by the indians, resettled in 1690 or so, and the house built in the 1730's or so. The whole thing is a tourist attraction, a national historical site, etc:



And all of that some 300 years after your local insurance agency was built. Sheesh!

Sorry for the hijack, Mr. Wolf-tona.

LOL

Well, if you can't do 'big' you have to do 'old' I suppose. Like many traditional English towns, Hitchin is crammed full of houses from the seventeen hundreds and earlier. No big deal. It gives us a different perspective on things, that's all.

Everything's relative though. A few weeks ago I was reading that the city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan recently celebrated 3,000 years of continuous habitation. (Anyone ever heard of Osh, fer gods sake?) Some accounts claim that Alexander the Great led his cavalry up the high street. I think you could fairly say that Osh was 'old'.

That's a lovely looking house, by the way. I love American houses from the 'Georgian' period. They have a particular elegance about them: simple and well proportioned. Wouldn't mind taking up residence myself, in a house like that.

[sv-wolf]

Hitchin's a really lovely old market town - and, for a small town, it's lively with it. There is a big pub and restaurant scene in the evenings. As the town is only 30 minutes by train from London it is also very much in demand as a place to live.

Don't know if anyone is interested in this sort of thing, but here's a few of the town's obviously 'old' buildings. In this part of the country beams would have been plastered over when the houses were first built. 'Old' is trendy these days, so exposing the beams punches home the point, I suppose.


This is one of Hitchin's liveliest and most 'disreputable' pubs. Del
Basso's motorcycle dealers beyond the pub has been here ever since I was a kid.






There are also quite a few Georgian houses in the town from the
1700s.


Between this building and the next you can see a gap. This is where the
river runs under the road. Yep, as I said, we don't do big! So this
piddling little stream which you could easily jump over at this point is the
town's mighty river Hiz.




And of course, the church. The oldest part of the present building dates
back to 1190 but there has been a church on this site since 760 AD The present building countains courses of Roman 'bricks' which,
archaeologists think were taken from a nearby villa. They would have been made locally about 1,900 years ago


The Roman 'bricks' form the thin red stringer course in between
the flint and other stones.

[jstark47]

SV- I think the biggest difference between the UK and USA is the amount of green open space that the UK seems to have preserved, even in built-up areas. If I read the satellite overheads correctly, Hitchin is still physically separated from Stevenage and even from Letchworth by "green space." In the USA, towns that close would have grown together into one big blob decades ago. Any community only 30 minutes away from a major city generally has been submerged in surburban sprawl - housing developments, strip shopping centers, and light industrial parks. My town is about as close to Philadelphia as Hitchin is to London, and has pretty much lost any character it had underneath the tidal wave of typical American suburban development.

(To bring this remotely on topic to a motorcycle forum, ...that means we have to travel quite a way to get to decent riding roads.)

[sv-wolf]

SV- I think the biggest difference between the UK and USA is the amount of green open space that the UK seems to have preserved, even in built-up areas. If I read the satellite overheads correctly, Hitchin is still physically separated from Stevenage and even from Letchworth by "green space." In the USA, towns that close would have grown together into one big blob decades ago. Any community only 30 minutes away from a major city generally has been submerged in surburban sprawl - housing developments, strip shopping centers, and light industrial parks. My town is about as close to Philadelphia as Hitchin is to London, and has pretty much lost any character it had underneath the tidal wave of typical American suburban development.

(To bring this remotely on topic to a motorcycle forum, ...that means we have to travel quite a way to get to decent riding roads.)

Hi Mr S

Well, that really surprises me. I suppose it surprises me because of the sheer amount of space you guys have to play with. In the UK we are so crowded up together. On the other hand we have always had very strong planning laws here which have limited development. I get the impression that that is happening more and more in the US now too.

You are absolutely right, though, each town is surrounded by an area of land designated as 'green belt' which has historically been sacrosanct. These days there is a huge government drive to build 100,000s more houses. The result is that more and more green belt land is being eaten up. This arouses very strong feelings in people. 'Preserving the green belt' is almost a national religion.

Apart from the capital, there just are no huge cities in the south of England at all. There aren't even that many big towns. What you will find are lots of small towns and thousands of villages. The towns are joined up by a generally good network of 'A' roads, while the villages are connected to each other by a dense web of gorgeous twisty little lanes. It makes for some brilliant riding with plenty of choice

It's different in the north and midlands. There you do get some huge cities but between them there is plenty of great scenery. Most of the mountainous areas are in the north.

On the other hand, we don't have the distances that you have. Get out into the country, here on the little roads, and though you might find a good stretch where you can open the throttle, every couple of miles you're having to slow down to 30mph as you pass through one village after another.

[pigsbladder]

I gotta disagree jstark. In my experience it's completely opposite. North Eastern England where I used to live sure there were places you could ride and a few back roads, but for the most part it's congested. The sheer space where I live now in the US is just insane. Just 10/15 minutes from the house, we can turn up a road and not encounter another car for the entire section of road. I'm sure NJ is very different from AR however.

[sv-wolf]

I gotta disagree jstark. In my experience it's completely opposite. North Eastern England where I used to live sure there were places you could ride and a few back roads, but for the most part it's congested. The sheer space where I live now in the US is just insane. Just 10/15 minutes from the house, we can turn up a road and not encounter another car for the entire section of road. I'm sure NJ is very different from AR however.

Hi pb

In my experience, the north-east of England is pretty congested, and is therefore not unlike many other parts of the UK, though it isn't typical of the country as a whole and is very different from the south.

Putting this in context, the population density of the US is 31 per square km, while the population density of the UK is 243 per square km - eight times greater (according to my ever-trusty Financial Times World Desk Reference). There is no avoiding that fact.

What I'm getting from your post, though, pb, is that general figures like that can be misleading. Clearly the population density in the US varies very much from area to area, from region to region. And the same is true of the UK. There are some parts, up in Scotland for instance, where the population density is very low indeed and the roads (outside the tourist season) are a joy to ride. Even in my own part of the country, I know a huge number of roads where I can bimble along and see very few other vehicles.

The skill in the UK is knowing which roads to ride - and the island is small enough that you don't have to travel far to find them.

(OK Mr Stark - I AM still trying to finish off the Scotland blog bit by bit.)

[pigsbladder]

Thanks for the insight mr sv . I might have asked this before but are you anywhere near Bishop Stortford? I used to work for a company called Cable & Utilities as their IT guy. I would travel from there over to Luton, Stevenage, and Cambridge. That was... jeez, more than 10 years ago now.... I feel old all of a sudden

[noodlenoggin]

I think the reason the US's density is so low is because while the cities assimilate everything around them with seas of parking lots, big-box stores and chain restaurants, everything outside of their amoebiac (word?) reach is made up of places like this:



This is three miles from my house, and pretty typical of where I live...and Michigan has small farms...the real breadbasket of the US laughs at our tiny little farms...real farms are too big to see all the way across...

(Motorcycling content?) The real shame is that all of this space was laid out to optimize farming -- all of the roads are straight unless there's an impassible natural feature (like a lake) to go around. Other than that, the roads are all laid out in a one-mile grid...yawn.

[jstark47]

I didn't respond to PB's post 'cause I've never been to Arkansas. I have been to Michigan, and recognize the kind of vistas Noodle posted. The part of New Jersey I live in unfortunately sits on the direct line between Washington, DC and Boston. Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, New York City, Bridgeport, Hartford, Worcester, even Providence all more or less line up on that line. Despite that string of cities, 40 years ago when I was a child, scenes like Noodle's were common in my part of New Jersey. Unfortunately, no longer. Even in remote far upstate Pennsylvania (aka "Pennsyl-tucky"), towns with functional downtowns are now accumulating the strip malls, etc. on their edges. (I.e. if they have any residents at all - the rest of the old towns out there are dying.)

(Motorcycle content- got to go northwest to go riding. Northeast / southwest just runs along the congested Washington - Boston line. Southeast is the Barrens, but roads there are pretty much straight and flat.)

I guess all this proves it's hard to make generalizations about this place to someone who hasn't seen it - it's just too big. SV- ya gotta come see it in person.... when ya comin' over?????