{"id":44719,"date":"2025-11-25T16:12:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T16:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=44719"},"modified":"2025-11-24T17:32:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T17:32:10","slug":"ihbcs-evaluation-signpost-from-sheehan-quirke-via-open-culture-how-did-the-world-get-so-ugly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=44719","title":{"rendered":"IHBC\u2019s \u2018Evaluation\u2019 Signpost from Sheehan Quirke via Open Culture: \u2018How did the world get so ugly?\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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image for illustration: London Skyline<\/a> by \u00a9 User:Colin and Kim Hansen\u00a0\/\u00a0Wikimedia Commons<\/sub><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open Culture<\/em> asks: \u2018How Did The World Get So Ugly?: Then Versus Now\u2019, offering Sheehan Quirke on video in response!<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Open Culture<\/em> writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than a few of us might be interested in the opportunity to spend a day in Victorian London. But very few of us indeed who\u2019ve ever read, say, a Charles Dickens novel would ever elect to live there. \u2018London\u2019s little lanes are charming now,\u2019 says Sheehan Quirke\u2026. \u2018but 150 years ago in places like this, you\u2019d have had whole families crammed into these tiny rooms without running water. There would have been open cesspits spilling down the streets, and the stench of sewage boiling in the midday sun would have been unbearable.\u2019 The stinking city, already the biggest in the world and growing every day, \u2018wasn\u2019t only horrible to live in, but genuinely dangerous.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the tremendous amount of waste produced by Londoners went straight into the River Thames, which eventually grew so foul that the engineer Joseph Bazalgette took on the job of designing not just a sewer system, but also an embankment to \u2018replace what was essentially a stinking swamp filled with rubbish and human waste and eels.\u2019 Though eminently, even miraculously functional, Bazalgette\u2019s design wasn\u2019t utilitarian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After its completion in 1870, the embankment was lined with elaborately decorated lamps (some of the first pieces of electric lighting in the world) that still catch the eye of passersby today, well into the twenty-first century. \u2018We don\u2019t associate decoration with cutting-edge technology, and that\u2019s a major difference between us and the Victorians,\u2019 who \u2018saw no contradiction between startling modernity and time-honored tradition.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quirke became renowned as The Cultural Tutor a few years ago on the social media platform then called Twitter. His threads have cultivated the understanding of countless many readers about a host of subjects to do with history, art, architecture, music, and design, with an eye toward the ways in which past civilizations may have done them better than ours does. The Victorians, for instance, may have lacked modern amenities that none of us could live without, but they designed even their sewage pumping stations \u2018with the same ornamental exuberance as any church or palace.\u2019 Perhaps they thought their sanitation workers deserved beautiful surroundings; they certainly had \u2018a sense of pride, a belief that what they\u2019d done here was worthwhile, that it meant something.\u2019 Current infrastructure, large-scale and small, is technologically superior, yet almost none of it is worth regarding, to put it mildly. Whether our own civilization could return to beauty is the question at the heart of Quirke\u2019s enterprise \u2014 and one his growing group of followers has begun to ask themselves every time they step outside.

Read more….<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

image for illustration: London Skyline by \u00a9 User:Colin and Kim Hansen\u00a0\/\u00a0Wikimedia Commons Open Culture asks: \u2018How Did The World Get So Ugly?: Then Versus Now\u2019, offering Sheehan Quirke on video in response!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,30,23,29,49,116,193,16],"class_list":["post-44719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ihbc-newsblog","tag-culture","tag-environment","tag-expertise","tag-heritage","tag-history","tag-infrastructure","tag-london","tag-planning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44719"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44720,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44719\/revisions\/44720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}