Architectural archaeology

I live in a house built in the 1930s, as part of the interbellum urban expansion. After the second world war, what Ireland termed the Emergency, the building was converted from 2 single bedroom flats into a 2 bedroom house. It has left its mark on the building: our living room has a picture rail that marks the old cornice of the ground floor, with mouldings buried under layers of paint and wallpaper, girders across the old walls and such.

This may seem irrelevant to a blog on gaming and scale miniatures, but it is all too relevant. In the late 1950s and the 1960s the craze of "modernising" hit, and numerous crimes against architecture were committed in the name of Modernism. This new trend stripped huge swathes of those buildings that survived the Blitz, and the possibly overzealous retaliation that wiped out huge amounts of the 19th and early 20th century buildings across western Europe. Buildings that were older that were recoverable were restored; more modern buildings were demolished to make way for parks and new housing, and huge industrial complexes.

Those buildings that survived the war intact are often, by now, stripped of all historical detail. While my inner architect is a lover of true, theoretical Brutalism, the archaeologist in me wants to excavate the modernisation away, to understand the architecture below. The hobby gamer in me wants to understand it, so I can produce models for the recreation of an Operation Sealion that, as a left-wing, gender non-conformist, sexual "deviant," mixed-race mongrel with severe physical and neurological disabilities, I'm very glad never happened, since I probably wouldn't be here in that reality.

There are 2 triggers behind this post:
1) my partner and I are in the process of trying to secure ownership of our house; and
2) I've been working on playtest roughs, made of flimsy, cheap materials, of the FW3 hardened defences built to resist such an offensive. If you're reading this, it'll be a couple of years before we can release them as saleable products. Years of hard work, testing them with different systems and testing them in comparison to the Regelbau templates of the Atlantikwall, and other, contemporary defences, something that, in a horrific circumstance transformed hobby gaming from something that the social elite (and HG Wells) would play on their pool, snooker or billiards table, or their drawing room floor, into the industry it is today.

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