I flipped England horizontal to see what it looked like and it’s so bizarre (I haven’t angled the picture at all, it’s just a mirrored image). How do you think England and its cities would have developed differently if this is how it actually looked- with the West Country facing France/Belgium?

8 comments

1. Bristol, Gloucester, Cheltenham and Newport would be a mega city with it being the Capital. Cardiff and Swansea are also huge cities.

   The midlands are very similar due to coal and being built by Industry.

   London is still an important city due to facing the world a bit like Bristol today but faces competition from Hull

2. Penzance would be the new Dover as the gateway to France. HS1 would be far longer, running out of Paddington and heading through Devon and Cornwall, so a lot more cities (e.g. Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth which would be much bigger cities than they are now) would benefit from direct rail connections to the continent. Expect Bristol to boom in a similar fashion to Lille, being a junction between two different high-speed lines, one going straight to London and the other going up north via Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds, the latter joining the ECML to York, Newcastle and Edinburgh. The geography would work so much better for a high-speed rail network and instead of Voyagers, we get Velaros on the CrossCountry route.

3. Rural East Anglia (now West Anglia, I suppose) would likely be the last bastions of Celtic culture and language in Southern Britain. Particularly up Northern Suffolk and Norfolk amongst the marshes.

   Then again, thinking about it, would the mountainous terrain of Wales and Cornwall have meant that Germanic, Norman, and Nordic migrations/conquests were far less effective?

4. just for the fun of playing alternate history id suggest instead of one major city, there would be two, one in the seven estuary, and the other in morcambe bay, the southern one would deal with western Europe and the northern one with scandanavian countries.

   the two centres would mean most of the west coast would sparsely populated other than essex and east anglia, which owning to its proximity to Ireland would serve as a regional city.

   irelands lack of military threat would mean the natural defense of the thames estuary would not be needed, and london would not have become a major or minor city, colchester would likely become the regional hub of western england.

5. For a start, I don’t think the Welsh or Cornish would have maintained their own cultures after the Saxon invasions, while their counterparts in, well, Kent and East England wouldn’t have been able to outlast the Saxons owing to geography. So you end up with a ‘Greater England’.

6. Assuming Ireland wasn’t flipped with this.

   I’d imagine we’d see Scotland and Wales having a more Scandinavian foothold and the western side of the UK being sparsely populated.

   I feel like history would play roughly the same but with a shift of culture being dominated by Liverpool, Manchester, Welsh and Scottish heritage.

   I’d imagine the western coast wouldn’t really have a boom until the Americas are discovered and people use the western coast as a “launching”/trading point.

7. Interesting! Depending exactly on where the island was flipped, “lands end” might be very close to France now. We might have built a land bridge sooner rather than a tunnel, and developed closer cultural links with the continent.

   Also….

   Gloucester Mean Time has a fun ring to it as the meridian point 🤣

8. Does the topography all follow with the mirror image? Because the weather would be far shitter in the east in general. Honestly, i just dont think this works. Because rhe river flow would be all different. Which would itself affect the topography.

   But id guess places like manchester/liverpool would be drier and more appealing. Bristol or maybe gloucester would be the capital.