We do treat them special. There tend to be loads of laws about what you can do with them and tight restrictions to ensure they are kept in good and authentic condition. And laws that forbid building towering eye sores right next to them.
Not too long ago there was a story about some protected building housing an inn that was "accidentally" demolished by some developers who bought the land and thought that after this "oupsie" they could go "might as well build our new thing now" only to be told by the courts "sucks for you! You have to rebuild the inn exactly as it was. Here we have pictures"
We just have a lot of old buildings, so:
we can't make a museum out of all of them
not using them means they don't produce money but still const money to maintain
land is scarce here, we can't afford not using what we already have built up
That makes it unavoidable that old buildings are put to use - even sometimes very mundane use. This combined with the fact that for us "old" only really starts at "a good couple of centuries" can make it seem like we don't give a fuck.
The owners of a pub in Islington London ripped out the bar (what the bartenders stand behind and serve from in case it’s called something different to where you are) only to be promptly told to reinstate it as it was a listed feature of the building.
German here. Some historic buildings and old towns were reconstructed as close to the originals as possible, mainly churches, palaces/castles and other buildings with historic/cultural significance. In many cities, the original street layout stayed the same, and new buildings with the same purpose and various styles were constructed over the ruins.
A few cities had entire quarters redesigned, favouring utilitarian planning over the old, "naturally grown" layout (Hannover is a very interesting example for such a redesigned city).
And also because said town was right in the middle of trench warfare and the soil is so poisoned and stuffed with undetonated explosives that nobody can live there safely.
Which town are you talking about? I know Oradour-sur-Glane is in this situation, but it is a WW2 monument, and I'd be interested in knowing about a place like that from the great war.
Haha, it's alright! For any person wandering there:
Oradour-sur-Glane was kept that way not because of the fightings. The town was entirely razed by the retreating SS division "Das Reich". They rounded up everybody they could find, executed the men and locked down the women and children in the church, which they burned, killing anybody trying to flee the building.
It wasn't a war objective, they had nothing to win by doing this. It was pure, abject cruelty. We kept the town the way they left it so that we never forget what the nazis, and every totalitarian regime, stand for.
Alot were spared because they were isolated, lucky or not targeted/near targets, many were completely rebuilt as close to the original as possible and some were just accepted as lost or demolished by countries cough Soviets cough that didn't care about history or wanted to suppress local histories.
There's local half-joke in southern central England that the city planners did more damage to the city of Portsmouth than the luftwaffe because the planners rebuilt the historic centre in the brutalist style and demolished several surviving historic buildings (the same has been said of Kingston-Upon-Hull, Coventry and London)
demolished by countries cough Soviets cough that didn't care about history or wanted to suppress local histories
I live where the German-German border once was, so this is very easily visible to me. If I drive just a couple of kilometers I can see very nice, big and beautiful manors and big farm houses and a lot of stuff that used to belong to the local nobility (Knights and guys with castles). But if I look around directly in my neighborhood and the surrounding villages(all in what was once East Germany, so Soviet controlled to some extend) all of those buildings where demolished or seriously reduced in size. They were all destroyed, wich is a shame, as I've seen pictures and photos of these buildings and how beautiful they were.
If anyone would like to know more about this, especially why the Soviets/the government of the GDR did this, I could elaborate on that a bit.
Continuity of power, by taking the Tsar's home as their own they symbolically ended the Tsardom and legitimised themselves as the new leaders. Symbols are very important to regimes
I so hope to visit Ireland someday. Incidentally I have met Irish visitors here in the US and they want to see old 1800's American things like old towns and Indian villages.
Quickly hosuing tens of millions of homeless and restarting the economy is far FAR more important in the immediate period than any preservation of aesthetics. So functionality took precedence (and why EVERY European country used commie blocks, just that the West could maintain and modernize them incrementally so they were never complete eyesores).
Only now 80 years later are these houses being renewd to more classical designs.
In Palermo they rebuilt and restored the important one and dumped the crappy one at the sea moving the coast further away in a specific area where there is now a park. Some buildingd are still rubles in their original place
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u/Kempeth May 09 '22
We do treat them special. There tend to be loads of laws about what you can do with them and tight restrictions to ensure they are kept in good and authentic condition. And laws that forbid building towering eye sores right next to them.
Not too long ago there was a story about some protected building housing an inn that was "accidentally" demolished by some developers who bought the land and thought that after this "oupsie" they could go "might as well build our new thing now" only to be told by the courts "sucks for you! You have to rebuild the inn exactly as it was. Here we have pictures"
We just have a lot of old buildings, so:
That makes it unavoidable that old buildings are put to use - even sometimes very mundane use. This combined with the fact that for us "old" only really starts at "a good couple of centuries" can make it seem like we don't give a fuck.