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Posts Tagged ‘Green Street’

Bill Nighy: Save Little Green Street

Posted in Architecture, Georgian London, Jane Austen's World, Popular culture, Regency World, tagged , , on January 25, 2009| 5 Comments »

Bill Nighy and Marc Warren

Bill Nighy and Marc Warren

Seen over the ether, this post on The official Bill Nighy Experience: The Official Website, offers a detailed explanation of what is in store for Little Green Street for the next two years if truck traffic is allowed unlimited access to a construction site. (Permission has been granted by the powers that be.)  Little Green Street is the only remaining all Georgian Street in London, with original houses and cobblestones. The road is quite narrow, and the street is used as a pass through by pedestrians and school children. Read my other post about the topic in this link.

Little Green Street is under 10 feet wide, as the photo below attests. How on earth lorries and trucks can rumble through continuously throughout the day without  damaging the street with its ancient architecture or affecting the lifestyles of its residents is the question that is being argued. View the rest of the photo set at Flickr.

Littel Green Street Protestors

Little Green Street Protestors

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Little Green Street

Posted in Architecture, Georgian London, jane austen, Jane Austen's World, Regency World, tagged , on December 14, 2008| 13 Comments »

Little Green Street
Little Green Street

Little Green Street is in danger. This narrow, cobblestone street is the only intact Georgian street left in London. It survived the London blitz in World War Two, but will be hard pressed to survive a contractor’s plan to flood the street (more a lane or pedestrian path) for four years with lorries carrying building supplies to and debris from a landlocked site. (View A Walk Up Little Green Street below to see how the lives of residents will be affected.)
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Most of us have come to associate Georgian architecture with the great or exceptional houses that are shown in tv and movie adaptations of classic novels, or visits to Great Britain. The majority of people lived in humbler dwellings. Second “rate” houses were built by merchants, for example, and were no more than 500-900 sq ft in size. These houses, small by modern standards, would have been termed “large”. The most important rooms would have been given the largest windows. On Green Street, “eight of the homes are bow-fronted and were originally shops, selling goods such as ribbon and coffee. The street’s name also has historical connotations, as Highgate Road was once called Green Street. Historian Gillian Tindall, whose best-selling book The Fields Beneath chronicles the growth of Kentish Town, has called the plans ridiculous. She said: “They cannot be allowed to rip this street up. It is important as a ‘survival’ of historic homes – there is nowhere else like it.”-Camden New Journal

Generally speaking,  the preservation of grand buildings and palaces is guarded more zealously by zoning laws than the humbler homes of the middle and merchant classes. To jeopardize an historic street for the sake of “progress” strikes me as supreme folly and short sightedness, especially when this is the ONLY remaining street in London that is truly all Georgian.

Save Little Green Street

A Walk Up Little Green Street

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