Badlands Media - Spellbreakers Ep. 175: Walking Tour #2 - London Bridge and the Roman Origins of the British Empire

Episode Date: August 1, 2026

Host Matt Trump continues his "summer abroad" as the self-described Rick Steves of Badlands, picking up the walking tour right where last week's City of London stroll left off. After recapping how a "digital" City of London projects financial power through shipping, insurance, and choke points, he leads you south from Bank Station down King William Street, past the Monument to the Great Fire, the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, and a glimpse of the Shard and Tower Bridge, all the way to the famously plain London Bridge itself. The payoff is his central thesis: the bridge, not the architecture, is what matters. London began as Roman Londinium, a military garrison built to guard the crossing, which he frames as the birthplace of foreign domination over Britain and a lineage of concentrated power stretching to today. Expect history, geopolitics, wry asides, the three-city model, and a promise to tackle the Normans next week.

The Badlands, one of the Badlands, explain those Badlands. That's a hell of their name. Hey, everybody. Good evening. Welcome to Spell Breakers on Badlands, Badlands Media.TV. We come to you every Friday evening at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, which is where I am, out here in Arizona time. and it's my pleasure to talk to you guys or anybody else who wants to tune in every Friday evening where we do this show and we cover a lot of ground on many things on this show.

But this summer, this is the second show in a row where I'm going to do a we're going to do a historical walking tour. It's called Summer Abroad. So we had all these foreigners here this summer for the World Cup and it was marvelous. And now we're going to take a trip abroad. We headed over to England. And last week, we did a shopping, we did a walking tour of the city of London. And so if you missed that episode, you can go back and watch it.

I thought it was very fun to do. And I hope you came along with that. And the city of London, well, we'll review that a little bit here. But first of all, I do want to say we have such wonderful sponsors for our show. Tonight are, we're sponsored by SavePulse. Save Pulse. So this is about, well, unexpected health emergencies. We've all had them.

And so what do you do? Oh, well, unexpected health emergencies. Unexpected health emergencies don't wait. And with Save Pulse, you can stay prepared from trusted medications like amoxicillin, erythromycin, azithromycin, excuse me, ivermectin, and, hydroxychloroquine to the medical emergency kit designed to help support over 30 common illnesses. SavePulse makes it easy to stock up on essential health supplies. At SavePulse, keeping your family prepared, it's ever been easier, and it's all delivered

with simple street-wide ordering process at prices you can feel good about. Whether you need an emergency kit or you're stocking up on everyday essentials, now's the time to be ready for whatever comes your way. Is it Badlandsmedia.TV slash meds slash meds today and use promo code Badlands to save 20%. That's Badlandsmedia.combed TV slash meds promo code Badlands. So welcome, everybody. I see there's a lot of people in the chat and I see you're here.

And hello, let's say a bunch of people. Oh, hello, Claritat 361, 367, excuse me, off by six, this evening. Claritats 37. I know the Clercat part pretty well, but the 367 part. Okay, so, and EC was here. Hello, good evening to all. Clercat 367 says, looking forward to tonight's episode. Ancient Lundinium, here we come.

Exactly. We're going to go visit Lundian, which is not a metal named after the city of London, but it's the ancient Roman name for, well, we'll see. Let's see what it is here. So yes, Ross Shark lives. Hello. Duffy's Tavern. $1.

Start happy. It may get dark. It always does. Team smooth. London bridges falling down. Exactly. We're going to find out the origin of that this evening. CNS 1000,

Eleanor 2000. Hello. Hello, wonderful friends. Polaris Park. Escape the Matrix 91. Leslie Beyer. Hello. K. O. Kelly.

Hello. Hey, and hello, I'm getting everybody. Yes, all right, all right, all right, all right. Those 23, hello, Pye Man, 6967, hey Matt, how are you doing from the heart of the Ozarks? Udall, Missouri, never heard of Udall. I've been to the Ozarks. Ozarks, like, my family took a vacation there when I was like six months out. Ozarks have to me this primeval thing, like,

from my very, very early childhood. Matt, is it possible Jesus walked in London? I'm not going to say no. I'm not going to say no. But let's think about that. Let's consider that question. All right. Keith O'Higgins.

I don't know how you meant that, Keith. We'll get into it. Okay, so we're pretending, basically. We're pretending that, like, I was calling myself, the Rick Steves of Badlands, like the Rick Steves of the conspiracy. So I give walking tours, and my walking tours are not the Rick Steve's type, although he's good, terrible tour guy. It's just that he has some biases. He has some biases. And I have some biases too.

My biases are different than his. So I give you a different kind of tour. And my tour is more like, let's go look at things with the eye of like how we like to look at things here in badlands. Right. And so, so we do, we do. We're just. doing that last week with the city of London, a really heavy topic that's been in the news. And we went out and sort of poked around the physical city of London and thought about what it means in terms of the political, geopolitical, what it means for power, because we're always studying power here. I like to study power.

How does power happen? How does it evolve over time? What are the requirements for power at any given time of history? I think about those things a lot. I'm really fascinated by the city of London. We have YouTube comments, by the way. I don't want to neglect YouTube's. Mooney F-2X.

Hello, Teresa Thomas. Babbage 3, MZ. Mouser. All right. Hello, all of you. I guess you must be over on YouTube, which I've been neglecting. Some people have been watching on YouTube. I forgot. Sometimes, you know, you've got to keep up with stuff.

RFV-116. Oh, good evening, Matt. Long time. Patel Patriot listener, first time for your show. My bad. Welcome. Oh, all's forgiven. I'm so glad you stopped by. At least give us a shot. You might like it. You might go to show and like to come back. I've got people who watch it every week. So it's great to see you all. It's really great to see you. Let's get our tour underway. We were pretending that we were in London and that we had a tour of the city of London last week.

And so let's do that again. Let's pick up where we look. Tonight we're going to pick up where we left off, sort of. Right where we left off right in the art of the city of London, which is not just London, the metropolis, as we know, but a special place within the metropolis. A kernel of it. And we'll review that here. Let's talk about what we saw last week. And then we'll keep the walking tour go from there.

Tonight we're going to walk down towards the river. Yeah. So we're going to look at the Thames River tonight. Okay. So we need to share our screen. share screen window monitor over here i don't have to lean in my big uh big old uh face and gray air into the monitor so much i can i can lean over

here lean over here so uh let's see i got to remember that the only thing is when i'm over here and i'm looking i'm looking this way it's actually off screen from from from from that so let's see so what do i look like here. Yeah. So I'm looking off screen, even though I'm looking at my big monitor. I wonder if I could turn that around so I could be on the other side. So I could look so it could appear like I'm looking at the screen. So this is where we are. We're a week tour of our walking tour. I hope you all had a good week. And this week it's called London Bridge. London Bridge is, and you've all heard of London Bridge. You've heard this song. But you know London Bridge? Do you really know it?

Because we're going to know, we're going to do a deep dive on London Bridge tonight. And we were using as a guide, this book I bought near 2000 when I did, I worked not right in the city of London, but in the sort of extended financial district of the city of London when I was working there in the year 2000. In the year 2000, yes? Um, what a time. I bought this book because I didn't know anything about the city of London. Now everybody's talking about the city of London. What does it mean? It means the means the special part of London. So let's get let's get on with it. Okay. So we're flying over to Great Britain. These are the British Isles, you know, uh, the great Britain, the big one,

and Ireland, the smaller one and then a bunch of other little ones and we flying, we flew into London, right and we wound up here in the middle of the heart of the city and we saw these places here and we learned that the city of london is a special district inside metropolitan london but it's also it's special in a lot of ways but one of those ways it's special is that it houses the great financial institutions of london and historically of the british empire And these include the ones you see here, including the one at the top, especially the Bank of England. But it's also got Lloyds of London that one that looks like a bunch of batteries stacked. Like, I don't know on top of each other there, number six.

And the Baltic Exchange, number five, which is all the shipping information and buying and selling ships. And we got the Stock Exchange. We've got the Lord Mayor's House and number one and the old Foreign Exchange, number two, and number seven. London Metals Exchange and we also visited some coffee shops, old and new there because the coffee shops are so important. A lot of the financial institutions got their start in coffee shops. So we walked around there and we saw a bunch of fun stuff. But one of the things, of course, why we're doing this

is because we're not just interested in the old architecture. And really the architecture of the city of London really has that heavy financial district kind of architecture. And it's not a place where a lot of tourists, of tourists actually go because you really need to know why those buildings are important to really have them be meaningful otherwise they look like a bunch of buildings with all these very banky you know it's like oh another one like that but if you know what they are about it really brings to life not just the history but the current events what's going on in the world right now because we have

this thesis that that that power around the globe has been highly concentrated it's part of i think how we on our side think of the world and think of the geopolitics is that we recognize how much concentration there has been in the hands of a small people and institutions and but they're generally cooperative on a common agenda and common agenda is well it can be expressed multiple ways but one of the ways it's you could say the common agenda is is that it's that they continue to continue to be in charge and that the and that the and that the and that they continue to be in control of enough of the levers of power that they will always remain in charge and they can keep it stable with stable enough within how what they consider stable which may be what we

consider stable but what they consider stable which is stable to them is that is the power remains in their hands without interruption. That's what stable means to them. Maybe the price of this and that goes up and down and nations are ruined and et cetera, but so long as power remains in their hands. And what the thesis we are working off of right now is that the city of London, these collective financial institutions, their successors and their, and how it's also spread is really, is this concentration of at least the financial power of the world elite to one place. And so why London, well, historically, that's where it sort of needed to develop. But at this point, one of the things is, yes, it's physically concentrated there with these

buildings, but really in the digital age, it's everywhere. And this is one of the reasons why the city of London has sort of come back from obscurity, I believe, is that it could come back. As long as it was tied to London the place, that became a limiting factor in the 20th century. But in the 21st century, it's roaring back because it can be everywhere because everything's digital.

For example, the stock market, the London Stock Exchange, it used to be a bunch of guys getting together and yell at each other with orders in a physical building. And that's in it only, traded during certain hours and that's how it worked. And if you wanted to trade on it, you had to have a broker who had,

maybe they had a broker. Anyway, that's how it had to work. Now, anybody can trade on it electronically, 24-7, anywhere in the world. And so, in some sense, the physical part of the city of London isn't as important anymore. But the expanded digital version of it is probably way more powerful than ever. And why is it powerful? Because it concentrates, it concentrates certain power down to just what it needs to be and nothing else. And nothing else.

See, you know, and so I made this graphic here. This is sort of the, so what is it? It's, yeah, shipping, shipping, and then it's got insurance for shipping. Well, you wouldn't think that's one of the big components of it. But it sure is shipping, shipping, news. shipping intelligence and shipping insurance, which is what Lloyd's does. Believe it or not, if you've got control over that, you've got control of a lot of the world right there, including all the oil.

So you don't need to independently control the oil. You think, oh, you've got to control the oil. You've got to evade the countries where they have oil and all that. It's like, that's not how it works. John D. Rockefeller discovered that. John D. Rockefeller quartered the market on petroleum in the United States, but without owning all the oil, that's too much of a burden to do that. He realized what you had to do is control how it shift. If you control how it shift, you can control the price of oil.

And if you control the price of oil, you control oil. So this is how the city of London works, is control of shipping, control of shipping insurance, control of the trading of precious metals. of the bullion stored in the gold in the Bank of England and of the London Stock Exchange, this is one of many stock exchanges. But really, it's that shipping and shipping insurance that really is their unique play in controlling the world. And it is all concentrated there. And so I put it this graphic here, this sort of has everything, but it's like, now you just see the abstract version of the, you know, displayed over the old city of London.

And, you know, there used to be a real proper British Empire, right? Let's talk about that a minute. There used to be really, because how is this not just the same old British Empire? Because it's not. The British Empire was pretty much dismantled after World War I. It was all around the globe, as you can see in the map here, if you can see the map. All the places in yellow were part of the British Empire. Literally the sun never sat on it.

you know, and you could say the home aisles benefited from it. This was that, you know, but this doesn't exist anymore. It sort of does, but not in the same way. And the reason is it doesn't need to exist anymore. The power has been sort of distilled out of it into this, into the digital city of London. And that's all they need. And that can exist anywhere. That exists everywhere and anywhere.

And so the empire was no longer needed, so they got rid of it. You know, they could control. What about all the natural resources in all these countries? They can still control them via the city of London. Financial. That's all they needed. They didn't need the rest. They got rid of all the rest of their direct control.

Sure, let the countries govern themselves, whatever. We're still going to, the trade's all going to come through still the same choke points. Choke points is the key. So that's what we got. And of course, we haven't started our walking tour, by the way, yet this is just a little musing. We have the, many of you know, the three city model, the three cities of world control.

And they are, of course, city of London is one of them in the middle with its flag there. It looks like the English flag, but with an extra little sword in it. City of London, which is a little place within Greater London. And then, of course, we've got Washington, D.C., the District of Columbia, and the Vatican, Vatican City. All three of them are enclaves in a way. You know, the City of London is a city within the city. Vatican is a country within a country. And District of Columbia is a district among states, a special district among the states.

Every one of them has a special status. Now, we're not going to get into the other ones tonight. each of them has their role to play. And as far as, you know, the city of London, yes, it's shipping and insurance of shipping, which means oil flow around the world and other markets. And America, what do we do at the district? Well, we supply all the debt the world needs via the Federal Reserve, and we supply the intelligence and spying via the CIA.

When I say we, I mean, the United States, you know, being enslaved to the District of Columbia, right? And then we've got our military power, which that's why they don't need the British Empire anymore either. It's because the American muscle is that we're the Americans of the shock troops, the mercenary shock troops for the world order, right? That's how they'd like to think of it. Now the military itself doesn't always want to say that, but most people who have even been in the military know what that means, right? So, all right, let's just check in on a chat here. Okay. Hello, G.A. 917.

Quango. Leslie Bayer, learning the word quango. Bay Theater. Old English school maps had the empire in pink. The pink bits. Yes. I know what you're talking.

Those, the National Geographic maps used those colors, too. And so there was that sort of dark pink for Britain and for the British Empire. I know what you're talking. And France was purple, right? On those, okay. And there was a lot of, there was a lot of French territory around the world too. Okay, so, but let's start our walking. Let's start a walking. So, you know, what is this? This map is from the year 1200. And this is an English empire. Did you know there was an English empire before there was a British empire?

England by itself, which is the part in Orange Here, had its own empire, and at one point its empire extended into what is now France. And that was the result of some, well, a divorce and a remarriage for Eleanor of Aquitaine, and then basically England wound up with possessions in France. and it led to a lot of trouble over the next couple hundred years and England finally gave up its empire on the continent. But that's not what we're talking about the British Empire.

So what are we talking about? We're talking about empire. Let's go back to the Roman Empire. We're going to go back to the Roman Empire. So here's the Roman Empire in 117 AD. Here's a map of it. And you can see it includes everything around the Mediterranean, everything in red, very expansive, includes modern-day Spain and France and Italy and modern-day Turkey, Asian Minor, and Greenpeace and all the coast of North Africa and the Mediterranean. And you can see it includes, well, part of Great Britain, the part that's England and the part that's Wales, are part of the British Empire in 117 AD. But we're going to see, that wasn't always true.

But let's, so we're going to use that as a reference. But let's see. Okay, so we're going to walk around now. We're going to rock. So last week we were in the area that's in gray. That's where all those places were that we saw. We're just in that square, which is inside. I don't know if you can see the dotted red outline that goes around in the map.

If you can't, you get sharp eyes. Stumps over there at the left side. It goes up little red dots and it makes a jaggedy thing. And it looks sort of like a potato or side of the Thames. And the gray square is part of that, about a sixth of it, I would say. That's the part we walked around. And we're going to break out of that square tonight. We're going to walk down to the river.

Let's do it. So we were at the bank tube station, which is right there. Right in the background, you can see the Bank of England. And it's formidable several floors of just imposing wall columns and the vaults where all the gold is, supposedly is, is down there in those faults underground. And this is the tube station. So we were here.

We walked around. So we're just take one more look before we walk on. And we're looking away from the tube station now. And there's a building back there. And maybe you could see there's a, there's a statue with a horse on it. It's black. If you look over to the right of the screen, there's a close-up on that statue with the Bank of England in the background. And what is that?

That's an equestrian statue of Arthur Wellesley, known more familiar, he's more familiar as the Duke of Wellington, who was the, among other things, he was the military, Victor at the Battle of Waterloo, defeating Napoleon, who'd come back from exile to restore his reign, and putting an end essentially to the Napoleonic wars. After that, Napoleon went into deep exile in the South Atlantic. And so officially after about over 20 years since the start of the French Revolution, there had been wars, on and off wars in Europe, because of France, basically. and this was finally the end of it. But this is not why the statue is here. The statue is actually here in commemoration of the Duke of Wellington's later, something he did later, which is he sort of cleaned up the city of London street plan,

including the street we're going to walk down today called King William Street. He planned it out. So this is actually gratitude for that, for his sort of making bourbon renewal in the city of London and bringing it up to a more. modern form right on the threshold of the Victorian era. All right. So let's, if we go over to the statue and look back to where we were, we'd see something like this, you see on this great here.

So there's a white, this Cornhill Street, there's a white van ahead of us. And that thing back there in the back with the columns, that building, if you can see, that's the Lord Mayor's House that we looked at last week. That's the government of the city of London. So we're going to follow the white van. It's going to go around the corner there. We turn onto Lombard Street, and we're going to head south. We're heading south now.

You can see a building up ahead there, if you can. That's an Anglican church. We're going to pass by. So let's go past it. There's a church just right to our left with this golden gate. You can see there's a Starbucks ahead. If you guys want to stop in the Starbucks and grab something. While we're here, we could take a minute to do that.

Okay, let's do that. Okay, let's move on. All right. So, hello, everybody. EC was here. When you soil a Wellington, you put your foot in it. Okay. I don't know that.

I looked it up. Okay. St. George's Sword. That's what's on the flag of the city of London there? Okay. Faith Theater Dave. I loved walking the Chelsea Embankment to the Tower of London. We're not going to go to the Tower. We're going to see the Tower of London this week, but we're not going to go there.

I think we're going to go there next week because we're going to do the Normans next week. But right now we're doing the Romans. We're doing the Romans. So let's get to Rome. So we keep walking down the street. It's got these kind of buildings, you know, these are all something. You know, it's this gray architecture. It's sort of bland, but, you know, like, I think there was like the embassy of Japan there.

And if you look down the street, we're now on King William Street. This is Duke of Wellington that created this street. And specifically so we, so people could do what we're about to do, which is go from the bank down to the river very easily. It's the Japanese embassy. In the far background, you might be able to see a tower back there with the gold on the top. You know, if you could see that. Okay, we're heading towards that. We're going down.

You can see that tower with the, it's a little bit closer now. There's the construction site off to the left. There is off to the left, I mean off to the right, off to the left, you can't see it. But if you could turn to the left, you would see a plaque ICBC. And this is the industrial and commercial bank of China. is what this is. And since 2012, this became the bank with the largest assets in the world, ICBC. So that's here right here in the city of London. Okay. Where else? They need an office here, too. So we're going down King William Street. All right. And getting closer to that column up there with the gold on the top. It's actually a gold fissle. Golden fissle.

And now we can't see the golden tower anymore. It's off to our left. So let's go check that out before we. You can see it's opening up ahead. We're approaching the river, you see. So off to the left, we go off to the left about a block and we'll see that column. And that column is actually, what is it? It's a monument to the, to the,

commemorates the great fire of London that burned most of the city of London in the year 16th. 66. And it was it was it was it was erected later and it was he was designed by a scientist. Robert Hook if you know who hook is. He did a lot of stuff with the with the microscope. He invented Hook's law, which is the law physics law of springs. If you take a physics class and learn Hook's law there's hook was was on par with Newton in a lot of people's minds with how great of the scientists what he was. But he also designed this monument, not a typical being a scientist architect wasn't an unusual thing back then. People were really versatile who were clever, smart people were very versatile. And you can go to the top and there's old drawings from the

inside Victorian era. People like to go up and look and go up today, I guess, as far as I know. And then there's a view from the top. If you look at the top of the screen, this is a view looking back to where we came. And we look back towards the heart of the city of London up there. And in In particular, you can see the Gurkin in the background, which is a Gurkin is, Gurkin's an office tower, and they built the Gurkin where the old Baltic exchange was, before the IRA blew it, blew it up in 1992. And then we built the Gurkin there. All right.

So this is the view you would get from the top of the Great Fire. We'll talk about the Great Fire as we go on, but now we visited the monument. And you can see on the next slide, there's a little map, and there's a monument. it to the Great Fire of London right there. That's where we are. And we're off a little bit from King William Street. We came down from the top of the map past the Monument Tube Station,

and now we're continuing down King William Street, because we're going to get back on there. And maybe you can see at the very bottom left of the map that's on the screen right now. Maybe you could see it says Fishmongers Hall.

Hello, McGriff. By the way, McGriff, I was having some of the sausage just a little bit earlier. Thank you very much, your summer sausage. Very good. Very good. Thank you. All right. So that's called the Fishmongers Hall. So this is, if you want to know a little bit more about the city of London, how weird it is. Okay, let's read about that. it's the headquarters of the worshipful company of fishmongers, that building that you see.

The worshipful company of fishmongers or fishmongers company is one of the 114 livery companies, livery companies of the city of London. Did you know the city of London? It has livery companies. It has 114 of them. Being incorporated, being an incorporated guild. It's a guild. It's like a medieval guild.

It's an incorporated guild of sellers of food in the city, meaning the city of London. The company ranks four, and this is the part where it gets really fun. The company ranks fourth in the order of precedence of city livery companies, fourth out of 114. Thereby making it one of the great 12 city livery companies.

It's been an unbroken existence for 750 years. Forming as, so since the late 13th century, forming as a city of fishmongers begin to collaborate for mutual benefit. Forming as city fishmongers begin to collaborate for mutual benefit. Okay, we're not going to do a deep dive on that, but can you just, can you tell that there's a lot of weird stuff that goes on there in terms of the structure, these medieval sort of ad hoc,

they made it up as they went along. and then stuck with it, you know, as opposed to, we were Americans, we expect a more rational constitution, you know, but this is like, well, this is just the way it is. This is time and tradition right here. So we're going to, so we're past them, the fishmongers, and we're going to keep going. And we're finally coming up down King William Street, and where you can see we're getting to blue sky finally now. And double-decker buses. So we'll keep walking. And if you can see, there's a sort of a pointy tower in the background off the left. And we're going to talk about that. That's called the shard. Another kooky building.

It's on the other side of the river. So let's keep going. First, let's take where we are. So we're where that red arrow is on the map, if you can see it. And we came down from the top, that red arrow at the top of the map, city of London, and we walked down King William Street. And then we turned and continued down this rest of King William Street past the monument to the Great Fire of London and the Fus Longer's. And now we're about to head off.

almost at the river. And look what it says. London, London Bridge. We are at London Bridge. So we hope it's not falling down. Ha, ha, ha, okay. So let's go check it out.

Let's go across. Let's go across London Bridge. Oh, here's another little map first, though. Another map. We're King William Street. We're about to go across London Bridge. Okay, all right. All right.

Yes, so this is still, This is where we are. We're about to go across on it, right? And here's London Bridge. Let's check it out. This is London Bridge. That's London Bridge. Isn't it cool?

Isn't it the coolest bridge in the world? This is London Bridge. You've been hearing about all your life. This is it right here. Look at the amazing construction. Look at this beautiful design. Have you ever seen a more beautiful bridge in your life? I hope you said,

Yes, because actually it's a but-ugly bridge, right? It's an ugly bridge, London Bridge. It's like the plainest, most ugliest bridge you can imagine. London Bridge. There's nothing remarkable about it, except that it's London Bridge. So that hardly seems right, right? But what's going on? Why is it so famous?

You know, we're going to learn why he's famous. There's a good reason why it's famous. First of all, let's just stipulate that when we say London Bridge, in a lot of cases, like with bridges, is the bridge the actual physical structure of the bridge? Or is a bridge a crossing that can be any structure that happens to be where that one is? In the case of London Bridge, it's the second thing. The physical structure is obviously not very important in its design and beauty. That's not why even today London Bridge is famous. It's because it's where it is.

It's the crossing of the river right there. That's what makes it famous. So we're going to get into that. And this is not, you see, you thought maybe this is London Bridge. This is what some people think London Bridge is. If you look at the screen, this is the tower bridge, right? This is the tower bridge, it's called, which is just a little bit downstream from us. In fact, this is the view.

You know, hey, take a look downstream from where we're standing right now on London Bridge. And we can look downstream and we see Tower Bridge, which is great. So London Bridge, among other things, has a great view of Tower Bridge. So if you want to see a Tower Bridge, it's all its glory, walk out onto London Bridge, which is what we've done. But let's, you know, maybe London Bridge has got more to it. than that. Here's a tower bridge more. Isn't it so beautiful? Tower bridge. And here's London Bridge and Tower Bridge together. So London Bridge is the one towards the top. You can see, if you can see them that. That's the Thames River. That's the Thames River. And then there's Tower Bridge down there.

Now, why is it the Tower Bridge? It's the Tower Bridge because it's right next to the Tower of London. Now the Tower of London, when we hear the word tower, we think of, we hear the word tower, we think of something that's towering, and it was at the time a towering building. It's no longer such a towering building compared to, say, the Gherkin and the shard, the other buildings that are around. And it's off to the, off on the right of the tower bridge, just, it looks like a little fortress with a with a castle in the middle of the grounds there, a square castle. the castle is the castle and the grounds and the whole thing is is the tower of London together sort of it's got sort of a green moat around it green area around it that's the tower of London we're going to get to that next week and we'll come back and we'll walk across the tower bridge then maybe two but for now we're up there towards the top of London Bridge and you can see that there's a couple other bridges up upstream from

London Bridge up there too. And there is a building now on the south side that I said it's not on this one. It's that pointy one. It's up in the left corner. You can see an image. That's called a shard. That's a tall, I think 93 stories or something. And it is, it was, I think it opened in 2012, maybe I want to say. It's a pretty recent. It was not there. It was not there when I was in London working at Barclays. And I was in London in 2014, but I was not so interested in these buildings, these new buildings.

Now I'd love to go a walking tour and see him. Well, that's what we're doing right now. So lucky me. All right. Now, since we're out on London Bridge, just a few things to point out. We pointed out the shard. Here's a good word.

Here's a good vocabulary word for the day. Billingsgate. Billings gate. It's just a, it's a place, but it's also a word. It's a normal word. I had to learn this for the SAT back in my SAT prep course that I took in high school. I learned the word Billingsgate,

but it's coarsely abusive language. Coursely abusive language. And it's named after the Billings Gate, which was London Fish Market. Ah, see, we just were at the Fishmonger. See, now a little payoff. So the Billingsgate Fish Market was downstream. from London Bridge on the city side.

So if you look at this photo here, you see London Bridge is up there, and we came across the bridge. We came from the right, from the city on the right. That's where the city of London is. And we crossed over London Bridge, and we were stopped here looking downstream at the Tower Bridge. And if we're looking downstream,

then the part of the city side just downstream from us. So just downstream from London Bridge. and off on the city side, that was where the old fish market was in London. And it makes sense that the fish market was there. Why does it make sense the fish market was there? Because it was near the city, which is where the people lived in the Middle Ages.

They lived inside the city of London. And it's as far upstream as you could get at the time. There was no tower bridge. It's as far upstream as you could get at the time, just like in a real, regular sailing boat. And then you couldn't go upstream from from London Bridge. London Bridge in the old days, in the medieval days was like a wall that let through the water. But you could not sail past London Bridge going upstream. You had to stop there. So they would

bring the fish and all the perishable goods. They're perishable. So you want them as close to the people as possible. You bring right up to just below London Bridge on the city side. That was the fish market. It's called Billingsgate. And today, it's a word, perfectly cromulent word that means course or abusive language. I like this, though it says, notorious for the crude language that has resounded through its stalls. In fact, the Fitch merchants of Billingsgate were so famous for their swearing centuries ago that their feats of vulgar language were recorded in British chronicler Ralph,

excuse me, were recorded in British chronicler Raphael Hollinshead's head's, 1777 account of King Lear, which was probably where William Shakespeare got its source for King Lear. In Hollingshead's volume, a messenger language is said to be as bad a tongue as any oyster wife at Billingsgate has. So, oyster wife. There's another word, whichever word we learned today. Oyster wife. Okay. By the middle of the 17th century, Billingsgate had become a byword for foul language. Okay. But we're not going to use any Billingsgate here, except maybe to express our opinions of the current London Bridge. So how old do you think this bridge is?

This structure when? It was built in 1972, right? That's right so beautiful. The most beautiful things were built in 1972. Here we are. There's a little black at least. London Bridge. Look at that.

It looks like an interstate off-ramp or something, you know. But it once looked. like this. This is what it once looked like. London Bridge. See, it's not the structure. Long before this structure, it looked like this.

It looked like his wooden structure that went across the Thames. And you can see the city, there's the city with its walls. It once had walls, the city of London. And you can see it was from the south side of the Thames on the left,

across, and then it went through a gate, and then it could go up. Up to what is now King William Street and then up to the center of the city of London. And that was a forum. That was a Roman forum up there. Where the Bank of England right now was where the Roman Forum was in ancient days. Not surprisingly. So here's what it might have looked like in antiquity when the Romans were there.

And, you know, like this, here's another. These are all hypothetical, imagining. So, but I just, you know, maybe amongst them all. So at first, at first it was not even this. The first bridge was like a pontoon, literally a pontoon bridge across the Thames here. Now, why here? Why is the city here? Why is the city here?

Well, why is the city here? You know why the city of London is here? Because of the bridge. The bridge is where it all began. The bridge is where Roman control of Britain began. The bridge is how Britain became an outpost of the Roman Empire. The bridge is why the power structure of London today can be regarded as a continuation of Roman domination from antiquity. I really believe that.

I really believe that. And so we're going to see how London. London was not a settlement of the native Britons. It was not, it was never, there was never a settlement of the ancient Britons there. It was a Roman military settlement from the get-go, from the ground up. It was always Roman. And it was about outside control over Britain. It was about an outside empire dominating Britain.

That's the essential core of its being as a city right from the start. Think about that. Think about that. What does that mean for what the city means now? We talk about all that power structures in the city of London. All of it goes back to an idea of a foreign domination, foreign occupational domination. So the city's there because the bridge is there. The city was built to protect the bridge.

That's why the city was built. It's a garrison. They brought a Roman garrison here. Because that's the way Rome works. Rome's not going to build a city without a garrison to defend it. They were very logical. So the city's there to protect the bridge. That's why it's there.

That's how important London bridge is in the history of world power. Put in all these ideas we just said together. So yeah, it looked like this after a while. So the Romans were there for a long time, by the way. The Romans founded, that's called Lundinium. Lunditium is what the Romans called it. It was named after a Celtic god, I think. But it was Roman from the get-go.

And so Lunditian was about 7580. So, you know, early writings of the Gospels. around that time, you know. Christianity is spreading a little bit. Rome is still pagan, but Rome over the next couple centuries is going to become Christianized, right? Going to a period of martyrdom of Christians, and over hundreds of years, this is going to take place. And in Britain was, and Britain was part of that. Lunditium was part of the Christianization of the Roman Empire. So Lundian is going to get Christianized because it exists for hundreds of years. It exists well, past the year 400 Roman Lunditium. So from 7580 past the year 400, we just celebrated 250 years of the U.S.

That's longer. Lundian Rome, Roman Lunditium existed for longer than the U.S. has existed. Why did it stop existing? That's a good, that's a good question. What, why, what happened? Well, you know, the Roman Empire fell apart and that includes the part of Britain, I'm going to say. So that's the short version of it. Right. So more of what the bridge might have looked like later on, not at first when it was a pontoon bridge. Here's another view maybe of Lundian with the forum,

if you can see on the screen. A lot of the south side of London, by the way, is a lot more open water down there, a lot of marshy open water that would later be filled in. And some of that area, maybe on the high ground there, is where the Globe, Shakespeare's Globe Theater, is today. That's Southwark.

It looks like it's called Southwark. There's a cathedral, southern cathedral. But they filled that whole, so the river has a smooth bank on that. It doesn't have that big inlet there anymore. But the north side hasn't changed much. The north side looks like it did before.

That's because the north side is high ground. The north side is high ground. the fact that there's high ground there means they could build a fort there. And they could, because they could build a fort there, they put the bridge there. That's, so we're putting together why there's a bridge there and why there's a thing there.

So they needed a bridge somewhere along the Thames here. The Romans did. They wanted a bridge. We'll see exactly why. He'll build it here. During the rest of the show, we see it. But we'll, but on the north side,

they built a, that walled city to protect it. So London began as a walled city to protect a foreign occupation of the British Isles, of Great Britain, because the Romans never occupied Ireland. All right. All right. Okay.

So, but first let's, let's, let's talk about our other sponsor. Tonight's episode of Spell Breakers is Bratel Breakers is Brat. you in part by our friends at happy Friday babbs and man hello everybody uh by our friends at sponsor oh rise attire oh we love rise attire rise a tire is really all our sponsors all our sponsors save pulse rise at howdy badlanders summertime is here what have you got on does it support the parallel economy and your favorite brands like badlands media and rise attire if not then you to come see us. Soak up some vitamin D in our premium tank tops for men and women, featuring newer versions of the devolution design in black, red, white, even blue and green digital

camo. Yauza, we got them for SciWore, Badlands Native, and Clown World, too. How about these bad boys? SciWore, Clown World, and Devolution beach towels to help you spark up a conversation with your new best friend or future spouse at the pool. And by popular demand, we've got athletic women's leggings. That'll have you red-pilling all the ladies in your Pilates class, whether they like it or not. Too bad. This is Badlands, baby, and we're strapped. Get some and support the new media parallel economy as much as fucking possible at badlandsmedia.tv slash rise. Okay, we're back. Ah, I see I got some comments. A Keoghiel, where does Budica come in? We'll get to her line of Britain. Matt should stick to science in my opinion. Well,

you know maybe i should but i'm not so yeah we'll get we'll do some science again but for right now uh i got to get back in the spirit of of for a while i sort of lost the spirit of doing the show for a couple weeks after dark it was it was a lot of stuff going on so i just need to get back in the swing of of enjoying the show and talking to the audience and having fun talking to the audience and and also to me there's a science of the study of power and uh and it's a it's i'm interested is interested in and if I can make it fun to explore it like this, then I'm going to do it. Because we're going to do something. We're going to do a Newton show. I guarantee you we're going to do some science on this walking floors. Okay. All right. The Holy Roman Empire ended in

1806 lasting a thousand years. Yes. Has the Roman Empire ever fallen? That's debatable. One can easily say that it lasted until 1806. All right. So we're just having fun tonight. So let's, there's more Lundanium, okay? And here's a map of Lunditium. And

this is ancient Roman Lunditium. So there it is an orange. If you remember the dotted red outline on the maps I showed earlier, it looks pretty close to that, right? That's where the old Roman city wall was. And there's the bridge. across the broken up islands of southern, okay? Southwide, it looks like.

But the forum is right there, and then there's, oh, and here's an interesting thing. If you can see there's actually a little stream cutting through the city, ancient Roman city of London. That's called the Walbrook. The Romans didn't call it that, but that's what we call it today. That's what they call it today, the Walbrook. And it's actually still exists. It just runs underground.

It's covered up now today as it goes through the city of London. Okay. So there we go. All right. It's got interesting both modern and ancient stuff on there. Like it's got the forum and it's got Lloyd's Register. Okay. It's got the Jubilee line, which is a modern train line.

Okay. Strange map. There's part of the Roman city walls right there. You can see part of them still exist. So let's just talk about how Britain became part of the Roman Empire. This is sort of the key. Lunditium existing required Britain to become part of the Roman Empire for a while. Lundianian becoming a...

So Lunditium had the, among other things, while it existed, it had the largest forum. So you saw the forum, right? The forum there. There it is on the map. And there's big squid. So every Roman city had a forum. The Lundian forum was the largest one north of the Alps. So it really was the epicenter of Roman authority in northern Europe, northwestern Europe,

was even in ancient times. It was London, Lundian. So keep that in mind when we think about how the power is working, right? It's funny how it's the, it really feels like. almost a direct connection. But you can't make too much out of it after a certain point that people try to make a little bit too much out of and say, oh, it's officially, you know, there's some Vatican document that says this,

that London is the, you know, this is how we, you know, maybe there is. I don't know such a document, but, you know, it doesn't matter, really. It doesn't matter. You don't need to buy into their little interpretations, you know, their magical thinking. You don't need to, we don't need to buy him to it. All right.

So this is what Rome looked like. This is what the Roman Empire looked like before Julius Caesar. So about 80 BC. What are you looking at here? 80 BC. So, you know, we've got less than a century ago to the birth of Christ. Palestine is not yet part of part of, part of, and by the me, I mean ancient Palestine, the Roman Palestine is not yet part of the Roman Empire. But Italy is.

has been conquered, and Rome got most of its new stuff outside of Italy. Rome conquering Italy just took centuries to do by itself. And then Rome conquered Carthage, which is on the south side of the Mediterranean, the part that looks like sort of a nipple sticking out there. That's modern-day Tunisia and that's Carthage. Rome beat Carthage, and they became rivals for control of the Mediterranean, about 200 BC. And they went to war at multiple occasions, and Italy triumph, Rome triumphed.

And so they got pretty much the whole Carthagin Empire, which was everything in North Africa and Spain and southern, in that coast of southern France, where Marseilles did it. Rome got all of that. That was a huge gain to become what we now call the Roman Empire. But we're only 80 years before Christ. But look, France isn't part of the Roman Empire yet.

And Britain certainly isn't. How is that going to happen? So who is living up there, by the way, the Gauls, who are Celtic, maybe? Using the word Celtic is very controversial. You can identify that there were people up there. The Romans called them the Gauls. And the Romans have been fighting them from 500 BC because there were Gauls in northern Italy. And so when Rome conquered Italy, step by step, they had to fight the Gauls on multiple occasions.

and at one time the Gauls got the upper hand and they sacked the city of Rome. Very famous incident in Gauls sacked Rome. Like 4-76 BC, long, way before birth of Christ. But the Gaul, we know them by their pottery.

There's certain kind of pottery. It's called the Lotten culture. Switzerland is where we find a lot of artifacts of the Celts. So they were in the area. If you see in the screen is sort of the area that's highlighted, which is way over Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, and Galatia, the Galati. Remember Paul's letters to the Galatians? That's that area.

So the Galati were Celts. And so were the people of Central Europe and modern day Gaul, where France is in Switzerland and Northern Italy, and also in Spain, and also pretty much all of the British Isles were these people that were the gulls. They were in tribes, tribal structure, and so they didn't have a common authority over any larger group of them than, say, a tribe, maybe one fortified town.

And that was how they lived, and they gave the Romans a lot of grief in the early days. A lot of the Romans, a lot of the strength of the Roman army over time kept fighting the Gauls and getting more and more organized about it. Because the weakness of the Gauls is they weren't very organized, whereas the Romans were very organized. So here's, I superimposed the map. Here's the Roman Empire in red about 80 BC.

There's the area where the Gauls live above it. I didn't get complete overlap, but it's the yellow parts there. So Rome's going to basically expand and take over almost all the area that was gallic. The Romans are going to be able to take all that area over the next 200 years, basically. less than that. So there's a famous statue, the dying gall, right? And there's, in Switzerland, they've found a lot of stuff in a lake in Switzerland. That's why it's sort of named after that.

All right. All right. So, so Rome's going to take over all that, including Britain. But how does it happen? Well, by the way, here's sort of how it happens is the Gauls live in, the ones in Britain and elsewhere. They lived in fortified hill town. they like the tribe where they would get together and they would they go to find a good hilltop and they'd build a

wall around it, defensive a wall and they put their cities in there and that was that and the Romans called them O-P-P-I-D-U-M Opidum and so in plural's op-ta and so the Gauls lived in Opita in both in Britain and in on the continent and but then what happens is Caesar Julius Caesar comes along. And you wonder why Julie Caesar is so important in history.

Well, among other things, he conquered the Gauls, at least on the continent. He conquered all of what was the larger area of Gaul, which is present-day France, and brought in it to the empire. That's how France becomes part of the Roman sphere. It's everything on the continent. And he does it. He's amazing. He took out, I don't know how many troops he had, but he took out and just one by one conquered one Golic tribe after another. after another after another. And they were pretty easy because they fight together. So it was his legion against a Golic tribe.

And then another Golic tribe. And so he was able to conquer pretty much modern-day Switzerland, moving inland, and then around the lower Rhine, and then modern-day Belgium, the Belgi, or a tribe of Gauls. The modern-day Belgian is named after. And then wound up through France. You're saying, well, why didn't the Celts, you know, get together and push it back? And it's like, well, they hadn't done that before.

They didn't have any structure in their society about how to do that. But eventually they did figure out that's what they needed to do. So they got pushed into that strategy, but it was too late. They got stuck with their old ways. And eventually they had sort of a high tribal chief, Versen generics, his name is. and he was able to marshal the remaining Golic tribes and they made a last stand and they made a last stand at an opidum

at the in Rome came for them and this tells you what was wrong with the whole Golic mindset instead of like taking to the you know it's like well screw that take to the hills and do a guerrilla warfare right we know that's what you're supposed to do being Gals they did the exact opposite opposite. Let's all get together in one of our towns and wait for the Romans to arrive, which is what they did in modern-day France. And what the Romans did is they came up to the

Opidium and they built their own wall around it. And they basically turned the last great Celtic stronghold into a prison, into a Roman prison without lifting a finger or losing a single man. And then they just starved them out. They built something like that. And then the Gauls had to surrender. And so Caesar got all of, the Rome got all of France. And all of the Gauls there were subdued. And modern-day France still thinks of itself as a Golic nation. They make statues of their last I chief.

They get Asterix and Obelix are Gauls, and their names reflect the kind of spellings that the Gauish, Golic language had, which is one of the Celtic languages, at least by language family, I think you can say that. if you ever been to France back in the 80s everybody was smoking cigarettes called Goluaz Blu and they had packages with that kind of

winged. The French think of the winged helmet as being gallic and and so they do. So the Rome wound up with because of Julie Caesar wound up with all that. It conquered all. Now it has pretty much all the Celtic area

except for Britain, except for Britain. but Caesar tries to invade it if you go back to this he tries to invade it and he gets pushed back the Romans the Gauls in Britain push him back, push him back into the sea he gets a little bit inland but he gets to retreat but he gets the submission of all the Gauls

in modern day France which is what in but so France still thinks of itself as a Golic nation in a lot of ways even though they don't speak a Celtic language and they get the Roman Catholic Church. There's all sorts of layers going on. All right. So now Rome is that. But you know, there's still Gauls, free Gauls living in Britain,

even though the continent has now become Roman. There's a 26-mile gap of water there. There's chalk cliffs on either side. So that's going to be like the fortress. And the Caesar can't get past this, Julius Caesar. So Britain remains free for the time being. And this is what Britain looked like back then. This is what free Britain look like. Oh, see, Londinium is on this map. See? We're getting back to where we were. So these are names, the things in white are names of some of the Golic tribes that were in Britain at that time. And the red dots are are some of the most prominent Opida, the Celtic Hill towns.

And you can see there's one right on the coast called the Routupupeia. And there's one northern along the coast on the north side of the mouth of the mouth of the Thames River is Camelododidum, Camelodonum. And that was a hilltop surrounded by marshes. So it was a great defensible position. And that's where the Trinovantes, if you see that there, the Trinovantes, that was their stronghold. And if you can see up north of them was the Isini, who lived on that marshy plains along

the North Sea. and the Katta fell off. And they were at the place Verlamium. That was another hill town. That was their stronghold. And that was the rival to Kamelodonum. And so there's three of them. And then you can see there's the Conti.

The Conti are down there by the gap, the water gap there. And the Conti, that's Kent today, Conti. And it's where Canterbury is. So that was a Celtic tribe that was there too. And you can spell Lunditium. So there is something wrong with this map. There is something really wrong with this map. It's that it's got Lunditium on it.

Lunditium should not be on this map because the Romans have not conquered Britain yet. There was no Lunditian until the Romans built it. It was not, didn't start as a hilltop town or anything. But it was on a hill. All right. So let's take Lunditium off. Let's take it off.

There's still the Thames River coming up from the mouth of the Thames. it still goes in, then it dips down a little bit, then it goes back up a little bit, and then it makes a turn to the south, and then it's sort of, you can see it much anymore. That's sort of an approximation of the course of the Thames. And I just wanted to call that out, because the KELF, they had their own network

of how they get from one another. They were friendly most of the time, and then they did trade, you know, it was, they could have a culture, if not a civilization. They had a culture of trade and roads and something like this. So here's an ancient Celtic trading network. And you can see there's from the continent.

Back in the old days when all the Gauls, I should say Gauls, when all the Gauls were free on both sides before the Romans came, they would go across the water there trading on boats. And they had a little port there, what is now retupia, or later became retupia. And Caesar conquered everything up to the coast, but he couldn't go across that street. So there was still free Britain for a while. And so at that time, retupia, Camelotinum and Verlamium, they were, there were, maybe roads was too strong a war, but something like that between the two of them. And the big thing was where it crossed the Thames River.

across what that little dark circle is. And that dark circle, well, here's the Thames River. Here's another map of it. And this has all the rivers that go into the Thames. Go into the Thames. And you can see the part where it dips down and it dips up as it's going upstream. There's the Walbrook there.

There's the Walbrook River. As I pointed out, that's where the city of London is going to be built where the Walbrook is because the bridge is going to be there. But if you go further upstream, past the river fleet. So that's another important river, the river fleet.

And then it makes a bend to the south. The river is you go upstream. And then there's the Tyburn River. Tyburn, T-Y-B-U-R-N, the Tyburn. And the Tyburn comes down from north of London, and it today's London. And it does a funky thing before it gets into

It basically comes out into a certain estuary where there's islands, and it sort of splits up, and there's some solid ground as islands in where it breaks apart as it comes into the Thames River. And those little islands are called eights, and it's E-Y-O-T, as you can see. It looks like E-O-T. It's pronounced an eight. And there's any, an eight is any small island in a river, but it really applies to the river Thames and the, and the, eights that were once along the banks as these little rivers came in, but they would split up, it would be marshy there.

So that's an important point because that is where the, that's where the ancient kilts put there, the ferry crossing of the Thames right there, right? All those, those, skips over those islands at the mouth of the tibern right there. So they had a ferry crossing where you could come up and, and, up from the coast. and that you cross the Thames there if you're on your way to Virlamium, for example, or up to Camelodonum. So the Celts had a ferry there,

but the Romans didn't, the Romans are going to conquer. The Romans conquer, finally, second try is a charm, 43 to 84 BC. And over time, they pretty much conquer everything up to near the Scottish border. and now they take over that area. Now all of that part of the where the gulls were living, that becomes part of Rome now.

And the Romans, that little crossing there at the Tyburn, well, the 8th there, they didn't find that useful. They said, we need a better one. First of all, it's the gulls are there. They know that, they know the best. back base better than we ever could. We don't want to, we don't want to tangle with that kind of a messy area geographically. And also it's, it's, you know, it's a sacred grove to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, not that mattered too much to the Romans,

but, you know, they just wanted to avoid all that and build their own crossing. And they needed to build a one that was further downstream. They needed a one that was further downstream from that. And so they could be a shortcut from Dover or two PA on the coast. They needed, so they could land troops there and march them inland. But the real thing that they had to keep their foot on was a Camelotidum up on the north. That became a Roman military. They turned it into a Roman sort of military veterans colony where they'd settle, they'd settle military veterans, give them land.

And they turned Camelotidum into a Roman town. and they needed to defend that with threeps from the south. So they needed a better crossing than the one, but the eights there. And so they built it a little bit further downstream, and they built it about as far downstream as they could possibly go. They found the hill that was the furthest downstream from there. They found the last hill before it became just flat marsh

on both sides of the Thames all the way to the sea. And they found the last hill, hillock the last decent high ground and they said this is where we'll build our bridge because if we build our bridge there we can defend it with the town we can build on the high ground there and so that's why it did and that's why London is the way it is built where it is and that's all built for foreign domination it's it's it's that's why it exists where it does so some of you were mentioning budica so budica was we got to coming up towards the end of the Budika was a Golic, she was from the Issin tribe.

The Romans hit when they invaded. Her husband was the chief and they killed him, raped her. They raped her daughters. This is the story. I don't know what happened. But as a result, she was really pissed off. And she let a revolt against the Romans, even at the Romans. And it was fought on the out on a Celtic road north of Verlamium called Wat Watling Street, we think. And it was a the the Celts were they used chariots which the row at first really the rope caught the Romans off guard. Chariots are an older form of warfare than infantry and cavalry cavalry or older. I mean chariots are older and the Celts the dolls were still using the Britons like let's say the Britons. The Britons.

were still using chariots. So there was a big defeat. Budica committed suicide rather than be captured. And that was the last big trouble, I think, that the Britons gave to the Romans before they... So the Romans have a better crossing where there's a hill and a bridge they think of built. It also is a shortcut from that ferry on the Thames.

You can see here on the screen. the river the old Celtic the old Golic the old Britain Britanic fairy crossing at the river Tyburn

that's what's now that's Westminster now that's Westminster. And that's where the the Westminster Abbey is built right I think where there was a a Britanic shrine a pagan shrine

and it's on one of the eots there In fact, here is, here's an imagining of the E-O-O-E-O-T. That's the wrong pronunciation, Matt, of the eight, E-Y-O-T that's there. And with Westminster Abbey up at the top is on it. And then the houses of parliament are right next door, Big Ben. The big been where there's now, there used to be water there where they're built now because they filled all that in area there. All right. So, in, especially, Eventually it looked like this. It looked like this kooky design here with the eight. And that's Westminster. By the time Westminster Abbey was built, it sort of looked like that. You know, they filled in a lot. And they filled in a lot today.

And there's a bridge there now, but it's not London Bridge. It looks like this. It's Westminster Bridge. People think this is London Bridge. And you can see the real London Bridge right now looks really ugly. And this looks really nice. And you would think this is London Bridge. but this is the Westminster Bridge.

And it's about 250 years old, I want to say. 1750, 275 years old. There's Westminster Bridge too, the Big Ben, all right? So this is the, this is downstream, is the Roman area. We talked about, this is the city of London. And so by 117 AD you have written as part of the Roman Empire now, you can see. All right. So, and it remains part of the Roman Empire until 350 AD,

till 350, past 350, So that's 300 years later. But then, or by 500, the whole empire is falling apart. And there's part of it that's still Roman, but the Roman rule has ceased in a lot of Great Britain by that point. And that's how the West falls apart into pieces, the Western Empire. Eastern Roman Empire stays going. The West falls into pieces.

And that's where the history we can leave off for now. because we're getting into see. Oh, but here. So eventually you get people called the Anglo-Saxons are going to arrive, the angles and the Saxons. Let's just skip ahead,

past 500. And we won't worry about how for the moment, but they're going to invade because the Roman authority. And then the bridge, this is what the bridge supposedly looked like later on. This is not what London Bridge.

So there's always, the key about London Bridge is there's supposedly been a bridge there for 2,000 years, continuously, in one form or another. For the Roman pontoon bridge, to the Roman wooden bridge, Bridge and then after the fall of Rome to something like this that were the were the angles and Saxons they're fighting off the Danes the Danes who are coming to to uh and this is supposedly where

London Bridge has fallen down came from is the Danes during a Danish invasion they used the bridge the bridge is a fortress wall itself and they used it as a fortress against the Danes invading up the river and uh and and threw all their shields and spheres down on them And that's supposedly the origin of London Bridge is falling down. There's another sort of imagining of it there. Okay. And eventually, but here's the thing. We've got to skip through a lot because we've got to wrap up.

This is what London Bridge is eventually going to look. It's something like this by the Middle Ages. Look at that. It's a solid stone bridge now, but there's like buildings on it. Yes. So London Bridge actually becomes an extension of the city of London. And it looks really weird. It's got buildings on it. And then eventually some of them get torn down and they look like missing, missing teeth. So we're not going to cover that tonight.

Eventually they had to get rid of that bridge. We'll come back and talk about it. And then it looks like this for a while. They built this bridge around 1750. And you can see that the great fire monuments in the background. This is London Bridge now. So imagine this from where we're standing. It looks a little bit same, but it's a little bit different. It's a different construction. And that's the bridge. And this is what it looked like. And it's no longer there.

That's bridge. Our new ugly bridge is the new London bridge. But you can actually still see this structure. The structure still exists. It's just that's not there. Here it is. Here's that bridge. It was built.

They took it away brick by brick. when they built this latest one, this latest beautiful one, and they took this one, and they moved it. So a guy bought it in 1973 when they were taking it apart. And he put it back together again, and you can see there's palm trees in the background.

That's right here in Arizona. There it is. This is called Lake Havasu City. And it's a really interesting place. Like, I like Lake Havasu City. I think it's sort of cool. They've got the bridge set up. They've got London Bridge set up.

there, okay? Imagine that. But the real London Bridge is the crossing. It's continuous from the Romans on down through the Middle Ages when there was a city on top of it. Imagine that. And now it looks like this and it's ugly, but at least it's got a little nice, oh, London Bridge, here you are. And then you've got a plaque seven phases of London Bridge. And there's a building in That's called the walkie-talkie in the background. I think they put it up in 2015. That's on the north side of the river, but, I mean, it's on the south side of the river, excuse me.

Oh, heck. I don't know which way I'm looking. And they're trying with new bridges. This is Millennium Bridge. They built that since the year 2000. It's a footbridge, but it's further upstream from London Bridge. So there's London Bridge and beautiful, modern London Bridge. And I can say it is beautiful.

I say it is beautiful. because even though it's an ugly 1973 bridge, it represents the continuity of the existence of a bridge there from the Roman conquest onward. And the Roman conquest onward means in this, in the bridge, we have the continuity between ancient Roman authority, the current city of London global authority. It's continuous as a bridge that has changed form and been rebuilt over

over and over again. But it's continued to serve its purpose of domination by outside foreign power, even after the Romans left. So next week, we'll, maybe it might be our third, a third of a trio of on this subject. We're gonna, next week we'll do the Tower of London because we're gonna go to the medieval era. We'll go back and see those things of London Bridge

with the structures on it. Let's go back, we're gonna find, do a little dive into that. But walk over there on our walking tour. But for now, this is a good place to stop. So I just want to check the chat. All right. Hello, everybody. Maybe Zach will be on OnlyLands.

Zach will be on OnlyLands. I will be on OnlyLands. I'm going to be on two weeks in a row. Ode to the Prussian pickle. Let's see. Will to push for award, Matt Trump. Somebody needs to reach out to Zach Payne and turn off his audio from the Red Phil 78 stream. He just finished.

I hear sounds from his stream apprehended. Oh, my. Okay. Well, I'm going to see him in a few minutes. I'll see him in five minutes and we'll tell him. Okay. All right. Oh, origin Pakistan.

Okay. Well, thank you all for coming tonight. I really appreciate it. Well, I'll tell Zach in a few minutes. I'm going to play you out. Next week we'll do at least one more in the walking tour series. And because we're just having. summer fun. But we're also spending power. All right. So we've got, I do have, we do need to

mention that the soft disclosure is a great product. I have the beard brush and I love it. And they are one of our sponsors tonight. Let's check them out. No, gee, G, we can't stop for snacks. Do we have to deliver all of these soft disclosure gift cards? We go by Zach Kay. The motion detective. putting over the beer bruce. Right, so let's see. So that was fun.

Another fun walking tour. I hope you had. I hope you had fun. It was fun for me. I'll say it was fun for me. And it was light and relaxing. But it kept us on, it kept us on subject when it comes to the New World Order and that kind of thing, which I'm, we always kept to keep our eye on that one more about that. That's true what we do here on Badlands.

Now, let's see. We're going to play off. we did soft disclosure oh but we got you know there's a GART 13 is coming up I will not be there September 17th but you should go everybody should go it's in Las Vegas

Las Vegas and Nevada September 17th September 17 through 19th September 17 through 19th 2020 26th the third installation of the Great American Restoration Tour okay so keep that in mind

I'm going to play off here I'm going to raid we're going to raid only Now I'm going to jump over there. I'm going to jump over there. Where's our chat here? Confirm raid. Okay.

And play off. I'll see you guys on Onlylands. Thank you so much for joining us. And don't forget to hit the thumbs up on this video. And a special thank you to all of our advertising partners. Please remember to shift your dollars to support those businesses that support Badlands Media. Thank you.