"So where was I? Oh, that's right - Barcelona!"

Rose Tyler...I was gonna take you to so many places...Barcelona. Not the city Barcelona, the planet Barcelona. You'll love it, fantastic place, they've got dogs with no noses! Imagine how many times a day you end up telling that joke, and it's still funny!

Doctor Who, The Parting of the Ways

One guess what port we're visiting today...*

- Sid

* Bit of an inside joke - cheers, Chris! 

Practicality Over Concept.

Every fantasy fan should visit England - specifically, the Tower of London.  Forget the overly ornate accoutrements of World of Warcraft, forget the impossible weaponry of Final Fantasy - completely forget chain mail bikinis - this is the real deal, from the various points in history when men buckled on steel plate and went out to kill each other with axe and sword.

As such, there's a harsh practicality to most of the armour that's on display.  When it has been ornamented, as in the images above, the various etchings and inlays decorate without reducing that practicality, without detracting from the armour's basic task of efficient protection.  Which makes perfect sense to me - after all, when this sort of harness was being worn, GAME OVER was a much more terminal statement than it is today.

- Sid

London Melancholy.

"London-of-the-sorrows," said Malice Priest

"London Misery," said Two Jane.

"London Melancholy," insisted Thin Molder.

M. John Harrison, London Melancholy:  The Machine In Shaft Ten

Day Five of the 2011 European Tour, and in spite of the title for this posting I'm in a pretty good mood.  However, it's been raining for the last couple of days, and I have to admit that rainy days when you're on vacation do make it a bit more difficult to be really happy about things.

But it seems oddly fitting to walk the streets of London in the rain; rain is part of the London mythos, a mythos based on over 2000 years of history as a city.  In spite of that extended pre-Roman origin, London is most notably the seat of Empire, and one sees a constant struggle between that Victorian legacy of bolted iron and crumbling red brick versus the modern marvels of geometric architecture, sheathed in mirrored glass.

It may be that state of conflict between the old and the new that has made London such a frequent setting for urban fantasies.  Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is very definitely the exemplar for this, a dark novel that presents readers with a London of grim enchantments and legendary monsters, where Earl's Court Station has an earl, Blackfriars Station has black monks, and Angel Station has...yes, an Angel. 

China Mieville seems to have a particular interest in London as a setting.  His young adult novel Un Lun Dun shows us a mirror London, an Un-London, as the title would suggest, filled with the things that the other London no longer uses.  And, of course, as would make perfect sense for an un-city, it isn't saved from destruction by the Chosen One, but rather the Un-Chosen.

Kraken, his somewhat tongue-in-cheek end-of-the-world piece, fills London with cultists and worshippers of obscure gods and demons, all of whom are predicting an apocalypse - just not the same one. And his short story The Tain turns London into a war zone in the conflict between humans and their mirrored avatars.

The interesting thing about these various fantasy Londons is that they exist as separate entities, where travel between everyday London and its alternates is a struggle, fraught with dangers and difficulties.  In actuality, London represents exactly the same sort of unreal combination of worlds - where but in London would you see a combination of architecture like this?

- Sid