Where is London's most central sheep?
80 comments
·January 23, 2025steerpike
barrkel
This only makes sense if you enjoy the English countryside.
I'm an Irishman. I grew up in the countryside, in the west, and spent 15 years living in London in my 20s and 30s. I can count on one hand the number of visits to the English countryside I made that weren't on the back of a motorcycle, and then, I didn't stop except for petrol.
The city is what I enjoyed, the chaos, the diversity, ambition, variety. No smaller city would be as good.
baxtr
Your preferred metric is "time to chaos" I guess then?
dairylee
Although it's not quite sheep Newcastle has a Town Moor (Larger than Central Park) which has grazing cattle. There's also a farm not too far from the city centre which has grazing sheep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_Moor,_Newcastle_upon_Tyne
gambiting
I was going to say, I'm sure Desmond Dene has sheep there.
rantallion
If you mean Jesmond Dene, there's a petting zoo with a few small beasts and birds. I know they have a couple of breeds of goat but I don't recall seeing any sheep on my last visit (within the last month).
fiftyacorn
Edinburgh used to have 2000 sheep on Arthurs seat right in the center of town until the early 80s.
There were urban legends about student pranks of putting sheep into the halls of residence rooms
noneeeed
I live in Bath, so quite a bit smaller than Bristol, but I really apprecaite the fact that we can be in the city centre in half an hour, or in the countryside in 15 minutes.
If I didn't live in Bath I'd probably live in Bristol, it's a great city. And I absolutely agree that it's kind of the perfect size for a metropolitan area.
I think a lot of London is saved by having so many parks, and so many large parks and commons. I know Paris has a lot less green space than London and when I visited I definitely felt that.
tonyedgecombe
I like Bristol but the traffic is so bad. It desperately needs a tram system.
Bath is nice though, my son lives there and we love visiting.
noneeeed
Hah, very true. I never drive there for a reason.
marbs
I like that metric. If we instead consider "time to cows" then Cambridge does quite well. Midsummer Common, Stourbridge Common and The Backs have (seasonal) cows.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-5616806...
skipants
That's amazing. Now I want to see how relevant a "time to cow" metric is to Canadian cities.
f4c39012
there's also a measure of the minimum appropriate "time to sheep" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_meas...
oneeyedpigeon
There needs to be a counterbalancing variable, though; presumably you want to live in a city, otherwise you'd just live in the countryside somewhere with a TTS of zero :) Maybe the other factor is "time for pizza to arrive at door"?
riffraff
there's presumably pizza in the smallest towns tho, I'd suggest Time To Theatre. Not because of the Theatre per se, but because "big enough to have a theatre" is probably a good proxy of "big enough to be appealing to people who enjoy something other than nature".
macintux
In Indiana, my favorite dinner theater is in a town of 500 people.
For a while, someone was trying to start a theater in an even more remote spot, an unincorporated community about an hour from there with maybe a dozen homes nearby, but they finally moved it to a large town.
mr_toad
Walking distance from the Pub to home.
More seriously, time taken to get to work.
mxfh
If you're in Berlin, especially with kids, there more than a dozen of children's farmyards (not counting zoos and actual farms) all quite central in multi-centric Berlin. Mostly for (early) childhood educational purposes, so they are are prime spot for Kindergarten day trips.
https://www.berlin.de/kultur-und-tickets/tipps/kinder/kinder...
https://www.visitberlin.de/en/farms-children
Since most of them are in former West-Berlin the reason they exist can likely be explained from a mixture of empty lots not rebuild after the bombing in WWII, historical farms in outer Groß-Berlin (Domäne Dahlem) and the impracticality of casual trips into the countryside with kids beyond the wall.
Xophmeister
Looks like there's an errata, already :)
https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-sheepish-apolog...
jrmg
Some good advice at the end of that:
1) Don't state something as fact when you haven't researched it fully.
2) Remember that when you do state something because you believe it's fact, it could be based on incomplete information.
3) If you're not 100% sure about something, best introduce at least some element of doubt.
4) Don't trust everything you read just because somebody you trust presented it as fact.
throw0101c
If anyone is in/visiting Toronto, Canada, there's a farm right downtown:
* https://riverdalefarmtoronto.ca
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverdale_Farm
* https://www.blogto.com/city/2018/09/riverdale-farm-toronto/
leprechaun1066
> they're goats, as any self-respecting three year old could tell you
Sheep or goat? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCzZN--4Its
captainbland
Last time I was there they had grazing sheep in Green Park. That's pretty central!
gadders
FYI - he's published an update: https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-sheepish-apolog...
tl;dr; - he missed a small zoo near Waterloo Station.
dhosek
Hmm, not sure where the closest sheep is to me here in the inner suburbs of Chicago, but there is a goat farm a couple miles away in the Austin neighborhood. It’s pretty wild seeing them take the herd to their pasture a couple blocks away from the house where their shed is in the back yard.
walthamstow
While Trafalgar is known as the official centre of London, you’d have trouble convincing anyone that Vauxhall is more central than Spitalfields.
gadders
It's Charing Cross: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross#:~:text=Since%20....
Pinus
Some years ago, I was looking for London hotels on some booking site, and noticed that they were listed as being so-and-so many km (with .1 or even .01 precision) from London, which seemed amusing given that they were all in London. So I fired up QGIS and drew a circle (in some suitable projection!) with the indicated radius around each hotel, and found that they intersected on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.
Quarrel
As the parent indicated, this stuff is surprisingly standardised in London.
Distance is measured from Charing Cross.
The Cross is near Nelson's Column, but I would be surprised if the column was actually the central point.
As others have pointed out, this leads to some weirdness, as lots assume that the City (old London & older Roman London) would be the obvious place to measure things from.
cesaref
There's also the confusion as to whether people mean 'Greater London' or 'The City of London'. For the centre of the City, i've generally thought that Leadenhall Market is the centre, given it is built on the original Roman Forum.
For non-Londoners, the city was originally a walled city, and lies to the east end of what is now considered greater london. It's these days synonymous with the financial industry. There are special laws for it, honours like Freedom of the City, it's quite an interesting place.
Although the wall is long gone, there are place names which refer to it, and the gates which exited through it. So we have roads like 'London Wall' and locations like Bishopsgate, Aldgate etc. Newgate was added in the 12th century, so not exactly 'New' these days, so not a very future proof naming convention...
https://leadenhallmarket.co.uk/history-of-leadenhall-market/
https://inspiringcity.com/2013/04/13/the-seven-gates-of-lond...
gadders
>>Although the wall is long gone...
You can still see chunks of the wall: https://livinglondonhistory.com/londons-ancient-roman-and-me...
foldr
There aren’t any special laws for the City of London (except any local byelaws). The City is administered in its own unique way, but English law applies just like anywhere else in England.
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-City-of-London-as-it-is-defin...
walrus01
As a non British person I would think the center of the city would be some point equidistant centrally between the boundaries of the original roman city wall, in the square mile, but the actual center of the city seems to have migrated since then.
nicoburns
Modern London encompasses two historic settlements (the city of London, and westminster). What is now consider the centre is somewhere between the two.
dghf
> I would think the center of the city would be some point equidistant centrally between the boundaries of the original roman city wall
That would be the centre of the City, but not necessarily of the city.
MrsPeaches
Anything that is south of the River Thames is considered "South" (prounounced "Souf" in MLE [1]), no matter the actual distance.
E.g. Waterloo Station would be considered South London but is actually at the same latitude as Buckingham Palace!
Hence why a Londoner would never describe Vauxhall as "Central".
Londoners would generally discount any part of this map south of the river from "Central London":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_London#/media/File:Ope...
madeofpalk
The center of the city has just as much (or more) to do with vibes than physical geography.
MrsPeaches
The River Thames, confusing Londoners sense of space since times immemorial.
barrettondricka
Wouldn't that need to be the sheep with the closest distance to all the other sheeps in London?
shermantanktop
In order to measure distance between sheep, you really should start from the center of the sheep. So let’s make the math easier by assuming a spherical sheep in a vacuum…
null
Havoc
Pretty wild to blog about that topic in particular haha.
Those all look closer to sheep singular? Mudchute has maybe 30ish
dkdbejwi383
As a long time DG reader, this is both really on brand and completely novel.
When my wife and I lived in Bristol we developed a metric designed to measure how enjoyable a city was to live in that we called "time to sheep". Basically it's a measure of how long you have to travel from the center of the city before you're in the English countryside surrounded by sheep and the best cities have a low (but not too low) "time to sheep" metric. It helped explain one of the reasons we loved living in Bristol so much when we had such a hard time living in London.
Could also have been that Bristol is just a crazy beautiful city to live in, but where's the fun in that, right?