Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
If you were to imagine an archetypal mediaeval city, one feature you would almost certainly include is a shining city wall. Even in the earliest iterations of that human dwelling which could be called a "city", defensive walls were almost always present as a way of keeping undesirables out. This basic design persisting for some six thousand years until their eventual fading from practicality somewhere between the 18th and 20th century (depending on your region). But despite them not being present in most cities across the globe any longer, their memory remains strong in our mind: one can hardly imagine a high-fantasy city without a wall after all. Many years ago I published an article about their ubiquity in the Isekai Genre (which even today remains probably my most read article, annoyingly because its pretty simple), and it is surely still applicable to everything of that ilk coming out in 2025. But when was the last time you saw a city in real-life with a defensive wall? If you live in the New World I may vouch for "never", but even in Europe fully extant examples of such structures are exceedingly rare despite their substantial frequency just a few centuries or so ago.
In England scant few "great" examples remain. York and Chester are really the only cities with their walls fully intact (and great they surely are), although remains of varying substantivity exist in nearly every town or city of size across the country. The reason for their demise can usually be accounted for by two intertwining reasons: upkeep and expansion. Firstly city authorities hate wastage, just as they are today they were always looking for ways to decrease spending, and so the demolition of a collapsing and pointless wall requiring constant upkeep was was an obvious cost-cutting measure for cities stretching back to the Tudor times. Secondly, and more commonly, it is just a matter of them being in the way. As cities bulged uncontrollably outwards in the industrial era, every city across the country had to expand beyond their erstwhile city perimeters, with many city walls being built over, under and across unsentimentally with factories, terraces and roads alike. Today the area demarcated by the old city wall usually encompasses just the central zone of any given settlement, with the vast majority of denizens residing without the walled city proper. London is the principle example. The area once surrounded by the city walls are known as "The City of London" (satisfyingly confusing to all tourists), and colloquially as the "square mile", being home to just 10 thousand of the metropolis' 10 million residents (0.1%). Today London's walls are all but invisible to the naked eye, dismantled and built over so much that you have to search to find their remnants. But like in many cities, the walls of London are gone but not forgotten: their shade still spills across the streets of central London. This is evident is placenames: Aldgate and Moorgate tube stations named for gates through the wall, and "The Barbican" for the fort which guarded the primary goods entrance. But it also has a deeper influence; the City (always meaning "The City of London" when capitalised) has a powerful council which itself is a corporation, and is a distinct political player in the politics of Westminster down the street being a (the?) centre for global finance that it is. Today the corporation marks out its boundaries with statues of dragons strategically placed along the boundary of the long-gone wall, which is something you can't help but start noticing in the area once you know what you're looking for.
But while the physical remains of London's wall have dissolved into a memory (or been hidden in the car park of a financial firm at 51.517611, -0.090528), other city's remain more obvious. In fact one of the most common fates of city walls was what I like to think to be a strangely appropriate one. One that is invisible at ground level, but quite plain once you see it from above or on a map, the darling of the 60s city planner, it is of course the beloved ring road. Nothing says "welcome to our quaint mediaeval town centre" quite like a grid-locked six-lane highway which literally encircles the entire place, a philosophy that poor old Coventry truly took to heart when she was rebuilt in the postwar. Coventry has for centuries been the pitiful butt of jokes in this country; its so bad that there is almost nothing nice you can say about the place without it sounding sarcastic. But the "City of Three Spires" has long been an important urban centre in this country, and despite her looks, is many times older than the industrial towns with which she is usually categorised like Birmingham or Leeds. At a time when these others were just villages, Coventry was one of the largest cities in the country and the de facto Queen of the Midlands, and as such she had a impressive embattlements: some of the longest city walls in England in fact spanning a distance on par with York's. The downfall of these walls began when the city sadly sided with the roundheads during the Civil War and became a base for the Parliamentarians (which redounds poorly on Cov's already stricken reputation). Her treason was not forgotten, and so at King Charles' restoration he ordered the pride of Coventry dismantled as reprise and revenge, leaving just two of the city gates standing today. The ridge which the wall had surmounted remained in place and disused as the city grew and grew into an industrial powerhouse, always there to remind the city of her shame. But as we all know Coventry's punishment would be multiplied one hundred fold during the 1940s, with her centre being flattened by the fire and brimstone of the Luftwaffe (destroying the naves of two of Coventry's three great churches, but miraculously leaving all three famous spires standing). The A4053 Coventry Ring Road was a central part of the city's rebirth, thrusting the city centre into the futuristic world of 60s car-utopias, and the obvious placing for the road was the conveniently circumnvaigatory, already publically-owned strip of land that was the former burr of the city walls. In many ways this road acts still as a wall, a hostile barrier between the grey concrete blocks of flats on the outside and the grey concrete office blocks on the inside, but it'd be a wild stretch to call it an equivalent exchange.
I think these two examples show the inversion of the city wall in modern times. Something which once served an obvious and useful purpose has obsolesced into an inconvenient but romantic ruin which cast long shadows across the cities they once embraced. We no longer need city walls, they are "out of place out of time". And when we do see them bubble up in the modern day they are dark reflections of their glorious ancestors. The most known example of this is the "Berlin Wall", a city wall meant not to protect the citizens but to imprison them. For those who have visited Berlin you will know the iconic Brandenburg Gate which once formed the greatest portal through the old (and also destroyed) Prussian city walls and served as a symbol of the German nation, and you will also know the path traced by a paved trail across the Tiergarten Park before it: marking out the route of the Communist "New Wall" which blocked off the city from the world and her beloved vaterland, where President Reagan once spoke those words in the title. But while this crude inversion of the mediaeval city wall is gone, others still remain. In Belfast Ireland twenty miles of brick walls and iron gates separate Protestant and Roman districts from one another. Built in stages from the 1960s until 2000s, these walls "protect" the denizens of Belfast from a violence within rather than an external foe. In some areas of the city, one can only walk between Protestant and Catholic districts by passing through police-guarded gates, a comic mockery of a "who goes there" town guard you might come across in a fantasy video game. These new, bastardised city walls are very unalike their old counterparts, and hopefully their time too has passed. Maybe one day Belfasters too can have massive highways stretching across their beautiful town instead.
