I have noted on here before how living in London seems to skew one’s sense of geography and distance. As a kid I lived in Congleton, a small rural town up in Cheshire. There, I could tell how far a place was by how long one had to sit in the car to get there. For example, the nearest major town, Macclesfield, was about six miles away, which took about twenty minutes to half an hour. This also gave me a good sense of place. Yet because of the traffic and the road systems, hat rule does not hold true in London: I find myself having to adopt an entirely new mental approach to geography, my ability to roughly gauge distances having had to be disguarded.
To remedy this, I decided to do a simple exercise. In google chrome I opened two tabs, both with google earth. One was centred on Congleton, the other Charlton. Both, of course, had the same magnification level. What I found was rather cool, and drives home just how gigantic the city I now live in is. For example, Winsford, the town where I went to school for fourteen years, is to Congleton where Wembley is in relation to Charlton, or thereabouts. I remember it taking us about forty minutes to drive to school every day; I seriously doubt we could get to Wembley in that time. Romford is my new Macclesfield, but I daresay if I told Lyn we were going to Romford to do some shopping, she would look at me as if I had suggested we go to Timbuktu for our groceries. Thus London has this strange warping effect on distances: the distances between places bear no resemblance to the time it takes to get there; you could say it has its own rules when it comes to geography. On one level it struck me how big London is inasmuch as it is just one city, one place; yet on another level it is very small inasmuch as it is a self-contained world.
This is probably interesting only to me, and hardly worth noting. Yet it just strikes me as one of those oddities I have noticed. I suppose it’s just another of those instances where urban life skews one’s sense of perspective, and where another set of rules apply.