Where is London's most central sheep?
173 comments
·January 23, 2025steerpike
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
muziq
The Ouseburn Farm in Newcastle (your last link) is a great place :)
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.
seabass-labrax
Trams would be lovely, but buses would be a start! Apparently, there was once to be a new high-frequency service with six buses an hour between Bedminster and the Centre, but the residents launched a successful petition to stop the plans on the grounds that the buses would 'cause more traffic'. Twenty years on, it appears as if there are once more efforts afoot to improve the transport situation:
noneeeed
Hah, very true. I never drive there for a reason.
justneedaname
As a fellow Bath resident I had to see if I recognised the name (it's a small place) and turns out we have worked at the same place in Bath (although many years apart!) Bathcamp caught my eye, may look into attending when it next comes round :)
noneeeed
Oh hey fellow Bathonain!
I've worked at a lot of places in my career, you've not narrowed it down :D
Thanks for the reminder. At some point I should try and get BathCamp going again.
ta1243
What amazes me is how dense Westminster is, considering it contains Hyde, Green, St James Park and significant parts of Regents Park and Kensington Gardens
Even with that, it's still the 10th most dense borough.
f4c39012
there's also a measure of the minimum appropriate "time to sheep" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_meas...
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...
jen729w
Perfect. This is what struck us when we moved from Melbourne to Canberra. In both cities we live/d in the inner-city hipster suburb: Fitzroy, Braddon.
In Fitzroy, any semblance of a sheep is at the least an hour away. It takes that long until you even feel like you're on the outskirts of suburbia. Leaving the city is a drag; so you don’t.*
In Braddon, we can ride our bikes for 15 minutes and see grazing cows. 15 minutes in a car and you're in rolling hills. It's magnificent.
(*Which, to be fair, I didn’t really want to most of the time. That’s why I chose to live in Fitzroy! But then you get older -- 48 now -- and things change.)
mihaaly
How about the 'time to cow' measure?
Cambridge may be unbeatable this way [1]. Which is also lovely - depite the unfunctional forced mix of incompatible old and new so typical to most charmful English towns.
[1] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/ba11/liv... (this one is at the Laundress Green but other directions are similar)
bryanlarsen
If your metric is time or distance to large amounts of nature, I recommend Ottawa, Canada where the 140 square mile Gatineau Park starts 5 miles from downtown.
aleksiy123
Vancouver is awesome for this.
Toronto sucks for this :((.
Also time is probably a better metric. You can sit in traffic for an hour to move less than 1km.
nucleardog
That's probably about a good distance. Too little distance to nature is... a thing. I'm like a half hour out of Ottawa.
Gotta take it slow down the driveway because sometimes the deer like to hang out there. And in the yard. And generally everywhere.
More than once I've wandered out and found a fox standing at the sliding door staring at a cat. (They are super cute though. Watching them they look like really playful dogs.)
We have cats because of the mice.
When the snow melts we get enough standing water that the ducks come and nest here. They're not much of a nuisance, but I worry about them with the foxes prowling around.
The rabbits aren't bad either, but there seems to be a lot of infighting with them.
Had a coyote show up one time. Opened the door and asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing and he hasn't been back that I've been able to see. I'm not a great tracker or anything but I can do a decent job of differentiating the tracks in the snow.
I'm told turkeys are hard to hunt. For a good chunk of the year if I just opened my door and tossed a brick there's no way I could miss.
Made the mistake of seeing some groundhogs around and thinking "eh, they're all the way over there they're not hurting anyone and we have lots of space" and then found the posts supporting the roof of my garage sitting on top of a big hole. Pretty sure I've been hearing one under my house trying to chew his way in when I'm trying to sleep. Tried all the deterrents suggested and they really don't care. My wife wanted to trap them and go release them on someone else's property. I started out with lots of patience, .22 rounds, and good aim until they seemed to catch on. Now I've been haphazardly throwing some 7.62x39 at them.
The mosquitos are atrocious. Thankfully that meant I had some decent pesticides on hand for when I walked into the shed one day to a pile of sawdust and found out there are ants that will eat wood. They'd also decided to move into my mailbox.
I also have some herbicides for the poison ivy and do my best to not mow it because I don't really want to be hospitalized. It's hard though because when you're up on a tractor we have a _lot_ of plants that look pretty close and if you don't mow the hell out of the edge of the forest it expands very quickly.
Speaking of hospitalized--made sure I was up-to-date on my tetanus and stuff. I don't know if I'm the only person crazy enough to care but that was a whole fucking thing to find someone to do that preemptively.
Oh, went out to clear the snow today and chewed a mouse up with the snowblower because of course.
I bitch, but I really do just try and see myself as the keeper of this nature. If it weren't for the mosquitos and groundhogs it'd all be pretty good.
bryanlarsen
> chewed a mouse up with the snowblower because of course.
LOL, I've done that too. I figure it must have been dead prior to being chewed up because snowblowers announce their presence fairly definitively.
We're probably much more urban than you, but we've got a ravine connection to the greenbelt, so do get all of the above. Has been a bear in that ravine, but didn't see it ourselves.
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.
asjir
I think this was overly self-critical - what would researching fully even mean? They can have however many sheep they want hidden within one-mile distance from Trafalgar square, no-one would expect the author to scour every possible location ensuring that there is no sheep hidden lol just to make a funny post 100% sure to be true
ajb
Guy knows his audience though. All of his posts are incredibly prone to bikeshedding. If our main journalists knew that their output was going to be subject to much detail-oriented scrutiny, we'd have the best-run country in the world.
nottorp
It also says "But they might have been goats.".
MrsPeaches
> But you can't go in and have a look, they don't take walk-ins, only pre-booked groups and very occasional public events, the last of which was cancelled.
This has a very Douglas Adam’s feel.
shalmanese
Cunningham's Law in action which states that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.
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.
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/
jeffreysmith
Chiming in to rep for our flock, the 5 most central sheep in NYC, conveniently located on Governors Island. https://www.govisland.com/things-to-do/recreation/hammock-gr...
gus_massa
> London Zoo's website does not reveal the existence of any sheep - at best llamas.
I never visited London, but in my experience children love sheep and bunnies more than elephants and giraffes. In the Zoo here in Buenos Aires the most crowed part was the "farm" were the children could feed and touch the animals. [1] [2]
So I made a search in Google and I got:
* https://www.flickr.com/photos/markestes/167928458
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=664GiPJBHaQ&t=84s
Is this the correct zoo?
[1] Now it was rebuild and renamed as an "ecopark". I never paid a visit after it reopened, but I guess now it's a big "farm" with a few legacy "zoo" animals.
[2] Don't ask me how many times I had to go to the baby bunnies spot.
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
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.
Theodores
Never mind sheep, what about cats? Larry, the Number 10 cat has to be a contender.
Considering the wealth of the nation was based on the woollen trade, with London being the place where weavers from Flanders made that wealth, times have changed.
The Speaker's Chair in the House of Lords is still a wool sack, although, a few years ago, it was found to be stuffed with horsehair.
The Royal Navy grew to defend the cross channel trade in wool and that led to 'Britannia Rules The Waves' in a big way, up until about a century ago.
The British weather and the plague made it so that wool was the winning product, with the customers being the armies of Europe and the slaves that needed to be clothed. Although mining was crucial to the Industrial Revolution, wool was the original cradle of innovation. We owe so much to wool, and sheep.
Oh, Fuller's Earth was also crucial to the success story, needed for cleaning wool, along with urine, which peasants provided all by themselves, in abundance.
Other wool was not with the long, tough fibres that British wool had, hence the desirability of the product.
walrus01
There's also not one, but two City livery companies that claim the wool trade, at #4 and #43 in order of precedence.
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...
null
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.
mattkevan
We used to live just a few minutes from the Oasis Waterloo farm and I can confirm there are indeed sheep. Pigs too.
For being so central it was surprisingly rural - there were horse stables and an apple orchard with all kinds of rare varieties just over the road from our flat.
As an aside, a family member recently became a Freeman of the City of London which means they're officially allowed to drive sheep over London bridge.
walrus01
Looking at the satellite view of some grassy rooftops in the city of London (the square mile), it seems to me that a sufficiently motivated wealthy person could keep several sheep in a more central location. Some of those roofs look like they have more habitat space than the most central sheep lives in.
gadders
A friend of mine at a city brokers with a rooftop garden told me that one of the traders released some rabbits there.
You could sit on the trading floor and look up and see them stretched out on the glass atrium roof sunbathing.
Quarrel
Finding the most central rabbit would be quite the task!
shermantanktop
By the time the survey is done the number will have changed. Instantaneous global knowledge is impossible, sadly.
defrost
There are literal multi floor spacious underground bunkers in London beneath some of the more exclusive and expensive properties.
A good many are known by filed dimensions, some are suspected to be larger than declared.
While a number may be urban bunkers, others ostentatious wealth displays for shoes, clothes, jewels, and rare collectables of the very wealthy perhaps one is home to a rabbit .. or a sheep.
dghf
> some are suspected to be larger than declared
I can't find a link now, but allegedly the Crossrail project accidentally tunnelled into one of these.
walrus01
For all we know, some wealthy sheep collector has sheep in a 3rd level sub basement in their London townhouse, strapped into an oculus headset and roaming around on a multi dimensional treadmill through endless grassy spring time fields.
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?