Evening all,

There's an exhibition of maps of London (and related things) spanning
getting on for 2000 years on at the British Library:

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/featu.../homepage.html

I went today - i thought it was excellent. Looking at a detailed,
colourful and entirely familiar-looking picture of the Thames that was
drawn five centuries before i was born sent shivers down my spine, and i
was struck by the way that over the whole course of the history of London,
Tower Hamlets has remained the poor part of town; from the Roman retreat
to the present day, the city expanded over dozens of square miles to the
west, but the East End has remained much the same.

There's a take-home CD with a Google Maps-based historical map overlay,
but you can also get that he

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/featu...downloads.html

I'll have to wait for Google Earth to be backported to MacOS X 10.3 before
i can use it, though 8(. Oh, hang on, it has been. Hurrah!

ObTransport: there's a lot about roads, and few maps about railways,
although surprisingly little about the tube. Plenty on the river, though!

Also, there's a copy of a map from the 1944 Abercrombie London masterplan,
mostly detailing the layout of the green belt, but it shows the locations
of airports. I recognised Heathrow, Northolt (i think) and the one down
near Croydon, but there was also one shown to the east, within the M25,
north of the river (i think - i didn't make an exact note). Any idea what
that might be?

tom

--
Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs - formal logical proofs
that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system
called a programming language - are utterly meaningless. To write a
computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that
whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly
follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. --
Dehnadi and Bornat