Cartman
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Post by Cartman on Sept 8, 2019 8:08:13 GMT
When I was looking for information about the Euston rebuilding I came across an interesting site called Ian Visits. Co.uk which had a section called unbuilt London and was about various building projects which never got off the ground. They ranged from the 1790s to the 1990s and some were totally insane. One of them was a 1990s design for a multi coloured tower shaped like a giant dildo and another was one from the early 1800s which was for a 950 foot tall pyramid which was to be a cemetery holding 5 million bodies.
There were others too, still on towers, one idea for rebuilding the Crystal Palace was to use the parts to make a 1000 foot tall skyscraper, which would have been as tall as the Shard, this would have been totally unsafe and would have probably collapsed. One I thought was quite good was a design for the replacement of the original London Bridge in the 1830s for a single span metal arch.
There's other stuff on it too and it's worth a look
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Three Litre
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Post by Three Litre on Sept 8, 2019 8:26:34 GMT
One of them was a 1990s design for a multi coloured tower shaped like a giant dildo That would have been the David Sullivan tower.
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Post by Cartman on Sept 8, 2019 8:49:38 GMT
One of the designs did actually get started. This was Watkins folly, an attempt at an Eiffel tower copy, at Wembley. The bottom 100 foot or so was done, but it was found that it was sinking into the ground and was abandoned. Wembley stadium was built on the site and, during the rebuilding of the stadium in the early 2000s,its foundations were uncovered.
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Three Litre
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Post by Three Litre on Sept 8, 2019 8:51:15 GMT
That's one of the great things about the internet, you can find all these little gems of history.
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Cartman
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Post by Cartman on Sept 8, 2019 9:05:55 GMT
I like the Victorian ones best, they had some great ideas, not all of which were possible, but they were willing to try anything. Edward Watkins, the man behind the tower, liked to think big. He was chairman of three railways, The Manchester Sheffield and Lincolnshire, the Metropolitan and the South Eastern,and came up with the idea of running a service from Manchester to Paris. The MS & L took care of the first bit, across the pennines, the Metropolitan the bit across London and the South Eastern to the South Coast. There was the little matters of getting from South Yorkshire to London then across the channel.
Firstly, he extended the railway from between Sheffield and Nottingham, which was as far south as the existing line went, to join the metropolitan line at Quainton Road, changing the name to the Great Central, then started on preliminary work on a channel tunnel, and some exploratory work was done, but the money ran out.
The only result was to discover the small Kent coalfield, and the GCR London extension never paid off and it became the last main line railway to be opened and the first to be closed, in 1966.
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Three Litre
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Post by Three Litre on Sept 8, 2019 9:12:05 GMT
I like the Victorian ones best, they had some great ideas, not all of which were possible, but they were willing to try anything. Edward Watkins, the man behind the tower, liked to think big. He was chairman of three railways, The Manchester Sheffield and Lincolnshire, the Metropolitan and the South Eastern,and came up with the idea of running a service from Manchester to Paris. The MS & L took care of the first bit, across the pennines, the Metropolitan the bit across London and the South Eastern to the South Coast. There was the little matters of getting from South Yorkshire to London then across the channel. Firstly, he extended the railway from between Sheffield to join the metropolitan line at Quainton Road, changing the name to the Great Central, then started on preliminary work on a channel tunnel, and some exploratory work was done, but the money ran out. The only result was to discover the small Kent coalfield, and the GCR London extension never paid off and it became the last main line railway to be opened and the first to be closed, in 1966. Fascinating period that, so many really significant inventions, civil engineering projects etc.
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Post by Sam Tyler on Sept 8, 2019 16:17:17 GMT
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Cartman
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Post by Cartman on Sept 8, 2019 17:44:38 GMT
Cheers Sam, that's the one
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