Police and Thieves in the Streets, Oh Yeah

worldwide - elaine - Thursday, May 12th, 2005 : goo

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in conversation, one afternoon in the golden heart recently, i was havering on about liverpool and watching riots from my bedroom window in the early eighties, and i happened to mention the way that princes avenue had been tarted up to make it easier for the police to fight the rioters before they melted back toward granby street. i had a boyfriend at the time who went out to take photographs, and was duly pulled off the street and driven back round to the front door and deposited - told very firmly to bugger off.
so this bloke, dean, starts telling me about how they built rounded corners in salford so as to curb cosh weilding whoevers, the better to police. i though this was really interesting and a fit topic for citynoise, and i wondered if anyone had any other yarns about such things. i forgot where he said it was and emailed my our mutual friend who was there, but clearly not as fascinated as me, since he didn't remember, but he told me;

"The Casbah had curving streets as they were much easier to defend due to the
necessity of having to fight for every inch also possibly why they were
known for curving swords
The Round Corner was the Stasi HQ and the GH is just round the corner from
my office" (the GH being the pub, but that is entirely another tale)

in london, you may remember from your history books, we had a big fire, 'the great fire of london' after which st pauls was built. wren, who built it suggested a new grid system for the streets, since the whole place had been trashed, but the idea was rejected in favour of using the old medieval
plan for the good and simple reason that people were much more interested in just getting on with it, so the cunniform stood. fast forward to the victorian days and the boom in population, and the beginning of policing. what became really difficult was the rookeries. there was one at aldgate (now E1), one at seven dials in the west end (now WC1), and one called the jago (now the very first council housing estate, E2). these were places which covered large stretches of land but within which there were no streets just rooms, alleys, outhouses, whatever, all built onto each other, and completely impossible to police. needless to say, they were pulled down.

(note to yanks; one of the biggest public housing trusts in london is peabody - he of the educational grants in the usa - he thought you lot needed educating and we needed housing. i live in a peabody)

so, urbanites. any thoughts?

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