818 Amsterdam Museums; Regenerating London; European Borders

25:25So no McDonald's golden arches. Exactly, exactly. You can have your brand name, but it has to be in the sort of approved letterhead and all that sort of thing, approved font and all that sort of thing. I didn't realize that, but that's my impression, is it's like a little time warp. And when you step out of that market thinking there's been business there for 2 ,000 years, your eye goes right up. Your eyes arc up because you're in a forest of skyscrapers. And what I love is there's some sort of a competitive spirit or a creative spirit where every skyscraper has its own personality. I love the architecture of the skyscrapers in London.

26:01Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's not just accidental. It's not, no. And I think one of the challenges you have with skyscrapers, and I think any city that's building big buildings, is how do we keep a sense of personality? How do we keep a sense that this is London and not any other skyscraper-filled city in the world? And how we've tried to manage that, I suppose, in London, I think, is by A, going for sort of excellent design, and be, you know, sort of creating our own sort of mythology or language about these places. We love to give our skyscrapers nicknames, usually based on what we think they look like, what they remind us of.

26:35So let's talk about that because we were on a... Every skyscraper, by the way, to get the permission to build, it's going to rob the line of sight from other people. So it has to provide something. This is my understanding. And it provides a platform like a public garden halfway up or on the very top that is accessible to the public, a garden in the sky, it might be called, where you can enjoy looking out and being welcome to enjoy that, whether you're a business person or a backpacker or whatever. And when you stand on the, we stand at on Fenchurch 20, was that the? The garden at 120. The garden at 120.

27:13And this is, for me, the easy access, because some of these have to take reservations and so on, but the garden at 120, it just goes up 40 stories or something like that instead of the very tippy-top of the skyscraper. But you get a view there, and if you know where to look, you can see these skyscrapers that have nicknames. Give us a tour of the funny, odd, designed, creative, delightful skyscrapers that have earned a nickname. What might we see and why? Well, one of the first, if not the first, to be built in the city was one that's a bullet-shaped building. I suppose it's like a bullet from a gun, a bullet-shaped building.

27:48But we call it the gherkin, which is the English word for pickle. because we think it reminds us of a pickle. It looks like a pickle. I like it as a pickle, not a bullet. It does look like a bullet, but it also looks like this giant pickle. Yes. And a lot of Americans don't know that. I think in England you say gherkin. So there's the pickle. Okay, what's another one? There it is. We've also got the walkie-talkie building, which we think looks like a great big walkie-talkie, a big telephone sitting over the city skyline. It does. It has the earpiece that sort of arcs in. That's with the big, massive garden in the sky.

28:18and you've got to buy a drink to go up there after hours, but it's worth it. And it's just an amazing place from the very top of that, the walkie-talkie. What's another nickname? We have the Scalpel Building, which we think looks like a sort of, almost like a surgeon's scalpel. It's got a very sharp point to it. And we have the Shard, which is the tallest building in the country and looks like a big shard of broken glass. It does, yeah. And there's the inside-outside building. Oh, yes, yes. Which is, the guts are on the outside. It's kind of like the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Same architect. And you've got the, what is the grater or something?

28:58Oh, the cheese grater. Yes, the cheese grater building, which it has this extraordinary angle. So sort of one side of it is vertical and then the other side is a sloped angle. And we think it looks like our cheese graters that we sort of rub our cheddar against to season our meals. Catherine Alcock's our guide right now on Travel with Rick Steves to the places that keep London hopping as one of the world's most dynamic cities. Catherine works as a private guide and leads themed walking tours around the city. She was named London's Blue Badge Guide of the Year for 2020. Catherine's also one of the city's infamous loo ladies, leading tours that show the city's history of toilets and sanitation, which start, appropriately enough, just outside the toilets at Waterloo Station.

29:43Her website is katherinealcock.com. Katie, I could talk all day with you about London. It's so much fun to have a local guide to be able to bring some background and some meaning into our sightseeing. Can you just wrap up this little conversation with a moment that, as a tour guide, you particularly enjoy sharing with your travelers to appreciate the London of today? Where would you take me and what would we do or see? To show people the London of today, I would take them to Coal Drops Yard, I think, because you have such an extraordinary variety of architecture there and spaces and different examples of how they've been repurposed and evolved, whether it's apartments built within gas holders, whether it's sort of coal yards developed into shops.

30:30And it sits right alongside some new developments, but also some beautiful old features like St Pancras Old Church. And you'd step into the St. Pancras train station, and at the end of the line, there's this towering statue called the Lovers, right? That's right, yeah. And what would you see? Because that statue, to me, really speaks volumes about what this is all about. It really does, yeah. It's a statue which shows two Lovers, maybe meeting, maybe saying goodbye. We're not sure. And the plinth of that statue is covered in smaller images of hellos and goodbyes, I suppose, all of which have taken place in this station over the past 200 years or so.

31:08It's an extraordinary example of how London is this place where people flood in, people flood out, and there's all these little stories and microcosms and things happening. It's an exquisite example. Catherine Alcock, thank you so much, and best wishes with your guiding in London. Thank you. Oh, London is a dainty place, a great and gallant city, for all the streets are paved with gold and all the folks are witty, And there's your laws and ladies fine That ride in coach and six That's nothing to drink but clarinet wine And talk of politics What's behind all the borderlines you see on a map? Are they designed to divide us or maybe unite people behind a common line?

31:49Well, John Elledge explores the surprising stories beneath the surface that have brought us the nations of Europe that we know today. He's back with us next on Travel with Rick Steves. Ever since I was a kid, I've gazed up my map of Europe as if a menu for great travels. And that map can tell stories. Countries in the European Union. Countries covered by the Ur-Rail Pass. Solid colors on the map masking lots of strife within, like Yugoslavia. Strange little countries. Why is there San Marino, Liechtenstein? And what's with Andorra? Poland's here one century, it's gone the next, and then it's back again.

32:29And religious squabbles. There's most of Ireland, and then there's that Protestant bit up in the north. Journalist John Elledge has been exploring the complicated way borders have been shaping human history for as long as we've been around to draw them. He's written a fun-to-read book called A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders, and it's designed to tell us the stories behind some of the world's best-known borders and some of its most controversial ones. He joins us now on Travel with Rick Steves to uncover how these generally man-made and invisible lines have influenced our history and how they shape our world today.

33:03John, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah. Now, your book talks about borders all over the world. I'd like to focus in on Europe, and you've got 47 chapters in your book. They're just a delight to read, and one of them is called Why is Europe Not a Peninsula in Asia? And looking at the map, it's a fair question. Why do we have Europe? It just seems like it's a big western chunk Think of a big landmass called Asia. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? I mean, continents are all, to some extent, kind of socially constructed. They're made up. But Europe is more made up than the others in that it's...

33:41Normally, you get at least kind of a narrow isthmus between, say, North and South America. You can see North and South America are two separate landmasses with a very narrow bit in between them. So it's reasonable to think of them as two separate things. There is no division between Europe and Asia. Europe and Asia are clearly very much the same thing. So I found it an interesting question to kind of delve into why we consider Europe to be a continent when we don't consider, say, Arabia to be a continent or India. And it seems to be a couple of different things, one of which is it dates back to the ancient Greek geographic conception of the world, where if you were an ancient Greek sailor mucking around in the Aegean, then as far as you were concerned, there were free land masses around you.

34:21And it made sense to think of them separately as Africa, Asia and Europe. But then that kind of gets locked in by essentially the Islamic conquest of the 7th century and the sense that there is a thing called Christendom in the European landmass, which is somehow different from the strange Oriental worlds to the east. So that kind of creates a sense of difference in the 7th century. And then when you get to 1500 and European imperialism, then Europeans get to impose their view of the world on everybody else. And that's the world we still live in today. So basically everyone considers Europe a separate continent from Asia, even though if you look at a map of the world physically, they're very much the same thing.

35:02It's so fascinating how geographical and cultural things come together and contribute to this challenge that we have of how do you divide stuff up. I'll never forget standing on the top of the rock of Gibraltar and looking out and knowing that this is the one place in the world where you can see two great seas and two continents coming together. at the same time. I was in Europe. I could see Africa. I had the Mediterranean on my left and the Atlantic on my right, and I saw the chop in the water and all the feed for the fish that attracted the fishermen, and then I thought of the problem Spain has with Muslims from Africa coming over that strait and complicating their world, and I thought of the Moors that swept through in the 700s and were pushed back in the 1400s.

35:48I thought of all of the tumult that happened right there because of that geographical kind of situation. And I thought, hmm, borders. Fascinating, isn't it? How did you get into your fascination with borders? I'm going to give you a very boring, honest answer, which is I grew up very near London's city limits, and it was very important to me that I was inside them rather than outside in the county of Essex, which is kind of our equivalent of New Jersey. So it's a much less glamorous answer than your tale of standing on the Rock of Gibraltar. But that probably is the root of my interest in arbitrary lines on maps.

36:28So you were on the London side of that border then? It was very important to my sort of sense of self-identity as a nerdy bookish teenager that I was a Londoner, not from Essex. That goes back to the whole European thing. I mean, I think to the Romans, the basic test was, did you speak Latin or Greek? And were you part of Roman civilization? And then you were part of the empire. And if you spoke any other language, you were a barbarian outside of that wall. And to this day, we see remnants of that Roman-barbarian border. I mean, as far as the Roman border went to the north, after that was the barbarian world.

37:05And in the Middle Ages, that basically defined the line between Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe. And to this day, we have that difference between North and South Europe going all the way back to barbarian and Roman Empire times. Yes. No, I mean, there are some very ancient borders that do persist from that era. I mean, like Hadrian's Wall between England and Scotland, it doesn't follow the actual border between England and Scotland, but it did set two different identities in motion in the second century AD that do persist to this day. The idea that, you know, most of the island of Great Britain is this thing we call England, but there's a mountainous bit to the west we call Wales.

37:49And there's another slightly mountainous bit to the north beyond Hadrian's Wall that has its own identity in large part because that was outside the Roman Empire. You know, that was a rough and tumble land, the land that you call home. You have the Romans deciding, OK, we don't even want to mess with these people to the north. Let that be Scotland. What a bunch of barbarians. And then you even have the proud people of Wales and the border today. It really follows an old rampart, doesn't it? Ulfers Dyke? Roughly, as so often happens with these things. The earthwork is kind of notional, like it doesn't actually follow the border exactly.

38:26But I think both the division and identity and the existence of Ulfers Dyke do kind of tell you something about a change in the landscape at that point on the island. like generally speaking, Wales is quite, I was going to say quite mountainous. You guys have proper mountains in North America. We don't really have those in the island of Great Britain. But England is generally lowland, whereas Wales and Scotland are much more highland. And that meant that it's unclear the extent to which these were the sort of Romano-British people who were pushed to the extremes of the island by the Anglo-Saxons when they arrived in the 5th and 6th century and the extent to which this is a made-up story about a culture war.

39:02But nonetheless, the different types of landscape mean you end up with different peoples living on them that centuries later become different nations. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're exploring the history of Europe's borders right now. And our guest is John Elledge. He's a British journalist known for writing about politics and history and social issues. John's written a book called A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. It looks at the stories behind the lines on our maps. John posts at john.substack.com and that's spelled J-O-N-N. John, when you think about the maps of Europe, I'm always thinking about Charlemagne.

39:39And a lot of people say Europe was born in the year 843 with the Treaty of Verdun when Charlemagne's administration divided his empire for his three grandsons. And when you look at the map today, you can still see that kind of fault line in the way Europe's countries stack up, can't you? going all the way back 1 ,200 years to Charlemagne. Charlemagne is a slightly underrated figure in European history. I think he's often, he doesn't have the reputation he probably should have, given that he did sort of create a European figure. Oh, underrated. I think he's the one name you've got to know in European history between the year 500 and 1000.

40:13Oh, I would absolutely agree with you, but I think he's not a name that's that familiar to people today. But he did create this empire in the 8th century of the Frankish lands, and it was divided between his grandchildren at the Treaty of Verdun, as you mentioned. The interesting thing about that division is you end up with a western bit based on Paris. You end up with an eastern bit, which is a bit more itinerant, but that sort of over the course of history becomes the Holy Roman Empire and ultimately Germany. And there's this bit in the middle that gets complicated. That's sort of meant to be the richest bit.

40:45It's the most glamorous bit because it has the original imperial capital at Rome. It has the modern imperial capital, modern to Charlemagne, at Archen. but it's sort of, you end up with this kind of no man's land that's not going to be either French or German, but could plausibly be attached to either. So a thousand years later, you still have wars over that territory. That becomes Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg and Switzerland and Alsace-Lorraine, which is obviously a name to conjure with in European history and features in numerous wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. That is so important.

41:20I was just going to say, let's review that. Charlemagne, He was the one guy that had Europe together, really, in the early Middle Ages, what used to be called the Dark Ages. And when he's gone, it has to be divided among his three grandsons, and you essentially have France, Germany, and the problematic little countries that stretch all the way from the Low Countries, Belgium, to Rome, where the Pope was. You just mentioned it, Alsace-Lorraine, the wars, and so on. That was back when you had a thing called, before we really honored primogeniture and they would divide the land among the sons. Later on, I guess they had to decide, do you want to have all that chaos by dividing it among the sons or do you just want to give everything to the oldest son, right?

42:04Well, if you're going to have a monarchy, you do face the problem of succession. If you go with, you can either divide it between your children as was the Frankish custom, but then you kind of end up with the territory split up into multiple little bits and they can often go to war with each other. Or you can have primogeniture where you just give it to the eldest one and then you face the problem that sometimes the eldest son is going to be an idiot. But there's really no good way of doing it. There's a good reason that we stop letting monarchs rule the world. And you got that complicated by feudalism, which is just another word for a fragmented society.

42:39And Europe was a bunch of tiny little states and dukedoms and fiefdoms before we had these big centralized powers. And of course now we've got the big countries, But there's a few little remnants in Europe that really go back to feudalism, aren't there, John? There are. So San Marino, which is a tiny hilltop settlement in the north of Italy, claims its origins to be in the early 4th century, which I think would probably have come as a surprise to the Emperor Diocletian, who firmly considered it to be Roman territory. But that somehow just didn't get incorporated into the nation of Italy. And there's a few of these.

43:11There's Liechtenstein, which could have been plausibly Austrian. It could have been German. It could have been Swiss. It ends up as none of them. There is Andorra, which is a condominium, which means its two heads of state are the president of France and the Spanish bishop, the Bishop of Agueil. And somehow it retains its independence. So these are remnants of feudalism a thousand years after the feudal Europe was starting to fall apart. And they remind us that there's a lot of inertia in these borders. There's some borders that made sense a long time ago, and today, they're just there. I know from my study of the European Union that the European Union really is not excited about borders drawn after treaties that ended wars because they often don't recognize the legitimacy of ethnic regions.

44:02They just want to keep this power happy and that power properly punished. So you have big treaties after Napoleon in 1815, after World War I in 1918, and, of course, with the fall of Hitler in 1945. And a lot of the lines that we live with today are dictated by that, not what makes sense with the ethnic roots of these regions. And the European Union, which is a new construct, is favoring the ethnic regions. I mean, I know that it's a big problem in Belgium because you've got a political border and it ignores the fact that you've got Walloons and Flemish, French-speaking people and Flemish-speaking people, and think about Basque country.

44:44There's millions of Basque people and they didn't get a country when they drew the lines. Well, Belgium is a complicated country to explain because it kind of doesn't fit into our modern conception of the nation state, the idea that everyone should share a language and a culture. But it's been explained to me that Belgium fundamentally is a king and a football team and the fact that the Flemings and the Walloons hate the French and the Dutch more than they hate each other. And it turns out that is enough to give you a functioning nation these days. We project the idea of the nation state back much further into history than it's actually existed.

45:16I think that's partly because it was spread around the world by the French and the English through the British Empire. France and England coalesced as nation states relatively early, both were about a thousand years old. But most of Europe didn't work like that. So you do have a lot of these territories that could plausibly belong in multiple countries. Actually, I've written an extra chapter for the UK paperback of the book, which is out later this year, on the history of Poland. And one of the things I learned from writing that was that even families could be divided as to what their national identity was.

45:50So the first president of the Second Polish Republic after World War One, his brother signed the Lithuanian Independence Declaration. They'd grown up together in the same family. They spoke the same language, but they considered themselves to have different nationalities. It's that contingent.

46:11This is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking with John Ehrlich. His book is A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. Hey, John, just to wrap things up, I'm wondering, how do you think the map of Europe will look different by the end of this century? Because it's a work in progress, isn't it? It is. I mean, Europe's borders are frequently changing. I think the last change we had was when Montenegro split from Serbia, I think. I think I'm right in saying that Kosovo is still largely unrecognized. I think probably the change I am most confident, well, two things. Firstly, I think we are probably going to see some kind of settlement in the war in Ukraine sooner rather than later.

46:55And I think the very eastern provinces of Ukraine known as the Donbass are probably going to be given to Russia, possibly before the end of this year. a rather longer term prediction. Just to be clear, by the way, I don't support that. I just think it's inevitable result of where things stand in Ukraine. A rather longer term prediction, I do think it is very probable we will see a United Ireland before the century is out. Star Trek predicted it would happen in the year 2024. That's obviously past now. But if you look at the demographics of Northern Ireland, which remains a part of the United Kingdom, the Catholic population is growing much faster than the Protestant population.

47:35And the various changes to the borders that have been made post-Brexit, not the physical changes to the borders, but in terms of the way they operate with trade and so on, will mean that there is a gravitational pull towards the Republic of Ireland and away from Great Britain. So I think it is very possible that we see a united Ireland in a decade or two. But we shall see. European history has never been predictable. So who knows? You heard it here, a united Ireland. Ha! Great, John. Let's check back later and see how that goes. John Elledge, thanks so much for joining us, and best wishes with your raising awareness of the fascinating importance of the lines that define the countries on this planet.

48:19Thank you for having me. John Elledge's book is called A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders, and it's now out in paperback. John also writes for citymetric.com and The New Statesman. We have links to his work in this week's show notes at ricksteves.com slash radio. That's also where you can email us with comments and questions, like a listener in Maine recently did. Arnie emailed us from Portland, Maine, and Arnie asks, when you arrive in a new country or destination, what are your favorite ways to settle in so you can dive right into the culture? That's so important, Arnie, because I know when I come in, I just like to take a moment to settle in.

49:01I have this attitude. I mean, it's so fundamental. I want to become a temporary local, like, you know, I always like to say like a cultural chameleon. So I make a point. I make a little pact with myself. I don't drink tea at home, but I'm in England, and a nice cup of tea after a day of sightseeing makes a lot of sense. When I'm in Tuscany, of course, I'm going to drink red wine, and when I'm in Scotland, I'm going to have whiskey. So have that become a temporary local standard. That's part of your attitude. And when you're settling into a new culture, so many times when I'm talking to people, the people who say yes to serendipity whenever possible, they're the ones that have the best experiences.

49:40A lot of people make a point to say no to serendipity. Everybody gets serendipity knocking on their doors. Make sure you let it in. And finally, you need to have an attitude about not avoiding culture shock. Culture shock, it needs to be seen as a constructive thing. It's the growing pains of a broadening perspective. So, you know, if people are fiddling with the worry beads, you can fiddle with worry beads. When people are playing backgammon, you can play backgammon. I imagine if you're with a bunch of strangers in a Greek taverna, you got your worried beads, you're sipping your ouzo, and you know how to play backgammon, you're going to have an experience far better than the person that didn't make a point to embrace the culture.

50:23Thanks so much, Arnie, and those are some tips on settling into a new culture.

50:32Travel with Rick Steves is produced at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington, by Tim Tatton, Kazmer Hall, and Donna Bardsley. Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court upload the shows to our website. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gerzoff. Our theme music was written and performed by Jerry Frank. You can find links to our guests and search the show archives at ricksteves.com slash radio. We'll see you next week with more Travel with Rick Steves. Hey, I'm Rick Steves. Since 1973, I've spent about 100 days a year exploring Europe. My mission? To empower Americans to have European trips that are fun, affordable, and culturally broadening.

51:12With my 100 well-traveled colleagues, we produce America's best-selling guidebook series and organize small group tours to take over 30 ,000 travelers every year to Europe. If you're dreaming of a European adventure, whether on your own or with a tour, we'd love to help you make it happen.