With a population of ~4.3 million, Jaipur is the largest city in the magical west-Indian state of Rajasthan. It is also the capital of Rajasthan, and thusly is the center of political and economic power in Rajasthan. Jaipur was not built until 1727, which is relatively late in the grand scheme of India. Indeed, it was constructed from scratch to replace the previous Rajasthani capital, Amber, which—having been a center of power since the 11th century—was apparently getting crowded and having issues with water availability.
Jaipur was the first city in India to have been planned from scratch, and as such, it has some unique features. To me, the most striking of these features is that it adheres to a very strict grid system, like Chicago. In older cities that evolved over centuries or millennia, in India and elsewhere, you will find no such geometric uniformity.
And we’re back with Volume THREE from Toronto. This is only the 2nd city after London to get multiple volumes in this street art series so far. It’s a great honor 😂 and one that Toronto is extremely well deserving of. This is undoubtedly one of the best cities in the WORLD for street art, which is a designation that I am more and more qualified to bestow with each passing month.
In vol. 2 we were in Kensington Market and Ossington. Now, we’re going to move a but closer to “downtown” Toronto, and explore an area called the Fashion District.
It was a random walk down a few alleyways in Toronto in 2016 that began my obsession with street art. At that time, this website was already well-established… but this was the first time I had taken so many pictures of murals that I felt the need to give them their own article. You can read vol. 1 here. Fast-forward almost 10 years, and this has become perhaps my favorite series on this website.
Well, today is a special one. It’s time for a return to—NOT ONLY the city that started it all for this series on street art—but the EXACT PLACE in that city. Almost 10 years later, we’re back into Toronto for vol. 2, and we’re going to start in the same area where I originally fell in love with collecting murals: Kensington Market.
Little by little I am visiting other places in the UK besides London. Believe it or not, Brighton was only the 3rd non-London location that I’d visited… but we’re not even going to see much of the city on this trip (we’ll come back for that soon). Today, we’re going to continue coverage of the European football/soccer circuit with an English Premier League match in Brighton. The match is Brighton & Hove Albion (a.k.a “Brighton”) v. Wolverhampton Wanderers (a.k.a. “Wolves). Here’s exactly where this match took place: Brighton’s AmEx Stadium, also known by its non-sponsorship name, Falmer Stadium.
Bath is a small town of about 94,000 people in the county of Somerset. By train, it is about 2 hours west of London, and it’s closely neighbored by Bristol and the Welsh border to the northwest. By all accounts, this is one of the most beloved and beautiful little towns in the South of England. There are lots of other sub-regions of the British Isles that I’m sure have lots of other beautiful towns… but in terms of day trips out of London, Bath is definitely in the top 3.
There is more to know about Bath of course—including the super un-creative way it got its name—but I’ll cover those details in due course. For now, here’s the map. You can enter into this place as uninformed as I was when my train rolled up one morning in late October.
Aix, like nearly everything in this part of the world, has a recorded history that stretches back well before the birth of Christ. Whenever I write these articles, I’ll always take a quick dive into the proverbial pool of history to see if there’s anything notable I should highlight… and in the case if Aix, I mostly came up empty-handed. In fact, the most interesting thing I dug up during my research—aside from the recent unearthing of a Roman amphitheater in a nearby suburb—was an interesting Medieval legend about a Dragon that supposedly sat on a nearby hill atop a pile of bones, both human and animal. This legend is interesting, because—although the presence of a Dragon cannot be confirmed—the pile of bones was known to be very real! It’s been the subject of numerous scientific inquiries to identify all of the original owners. There’s a really interesting article about this called “The Dragon at the bus-stop” that feels like it sets the scene quite well for a children’s fantasy novel.
So, with that in mind, the history of Aix feels relatively uncomplicated in my head. For all the history buffs, the history is there! But, for the rest of us, I don’t think you’re doing this place a huge disservice by just enjoying it for what it is now: a magical little place in the South of France.
There is a an urban offshoot of the nearby Danube River that snakes its way through urban Vienna where street artists have had a field day. This offshoot is called Donaukanal and you can actually walk along its banks for almost its entire 17 km length. I didn’t walk the entire length because, when you start to exit its super urban stretches, the murals start to be replaced with greenery (which is arguably much nicer than endless concrete and paint), but the stretches that I did cover were an absolute treasure trove of street art.
