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 we...