What's Under the Asphalt? London's Cobbles Send Japan Digging

What's going on

A British account shared a photo of a road where the asphalt had worn away and exposed the cobblestones underneath, joking that the road had been neglected so thoroughly it had gone back to the Victorian era.

A Japanese user who saw it wondered aloud whether the pavement all over London looks like that once you get below the surface. Replies from the UK suggested that it largely does: across the country, modern asphalt was often laid straight over old cobbled roads that were built for horses and carts, rather than replacing them.

That turned the thread into a round of "what's under our own streets?" Commenters swapped stories about Buenos Aires, Venice and Rome, and then came back home. Tokyo, it turns out, has its own hidden layers: old streetcar rails and paving stones that surfaced during roadworks.

Comments

A road so neglected it’s gone back to the Victorian period.

View on X

Wait, uh… does that mean everything under the asphalt in London is like this…?

え、あ、もしかしてロンドンとかだとアスファルトの下って全部そうなってる…？

I believe almost all the roads look like that. They only converted the roads to modern asphalt.

Almost every road in the UK looks like that underneath the asphalt. Not just London. When these cobble roads and pathways were built, horse and cart was the main mode of transportation.

So that’s why kings’ bones turn up. (In 2012, the remains of Richard III, a medieval English king, were found under a car park in Leicester.)

だから王様の骨が出てくるのですねぇ

When I lived in Buenos Aires I saw old cobblestones and tram tracks showing through cracked asphalt, just like in the photo, so maybe it’s pretty common in cities overseas?

ブエノスアイレスに暮らしていた時も、画像のように割れたアスファルトの下から昔の石畳や路面軌道が露出していたから海外の都市だとよくある事なのかな？

A guide told me this when I went to the US: when a road gets damaged they don’t repair it, they just lay asphalt over the top. So if you peel the asphalt off you find cobblestones and streetcar rails, and the car rattles when you drive over it.

これアメリカ行った時ガイドさんが教えてくれたんだけど道が壊れても修理せず上からアスファルト敷いてるらしいだからアスファルト剥がすと石畳や路面電車の線路が出てくるし、車走るとガタガタする

I think there’s a place in Venice or somewhere where medieval and early modern buildings are just sitting under the river.

ヴェネツィアかどっかに中近世の建築がそのまま川の下に眠ってるのあったなぁ

Rome’s got waterways and ruins under the roads too 🤔

ローマなんかでも道路の下に水路と遺跡あるもんな🤔

Paris and Rome probably have whole ancient cities just buried there.

パリとかローマとか古代都市がそのまま埋まってそう

Or rather, I heard European cities are still running on Roman infrastructure or something. Rome is way too strong.

と言うか欧州の都市はいまだにローマのインフラが現役とか何とか。ローマ強すぎるよローマ

Japan has plenty of places like this too.

日本もこんなところ多いですよ。

Makes sense if it was a horse-carriage society. Dig under central Tokyo and you’ll find a fair number of rails and cobblestones too.

馬車社会だったらそうやろね都内も下掘ると線路とか石畳はわりとあるよ

Actually, Japan is like this in some places too. A dozen-odd years ago, roadworks near Nihonbashi turned up very old paving from around the early Showa era, along with Toden rails, underneath. (The Toden was Tokyo’s municipal streetcar network, most of which closed by the early 1970s. Early Showa is roughly the late 1920s to the 1930s.)

実は日本も場所によってはこうなってるんですよ十数年前に日本橋近辺で道路工事があった際に下から昭和初期ごろの非常に古い舗装と都電のレールが出てきました

So this is the Tokyo find people were talking about. Kind of looks like London’s cobbles? Though historically it seems a lot newer: Toden rails and paving stones left under the asphalt of a bridge came to light.

東京で出てきたという遺構、これかぁ。結構ロンドンの石畳にも似ている？でも歴史的にはだいぶ新しそうね：橋のアスファルトの下に残っていた、都電のレールと敷石が出てきた

A recent one in Japan would be the one in Kawasaki, I guess. Is the Takanawa embankment something similar…? (The Takanawa Embankment is a stretch of Japan’s first railway line, built in the 1870s and unearthed during redevelopment in Tokyo.)

日本で最近だと川崎のやつとか高輪築堤も似た感じなのかな…？

They found stuff when they dug around Ochanomizu too, right?

御茶ノ水も掘ったら出てきたよね

Seeing that story a while back about Toden rails turning up under the asphalt, I thought: the number of years is different, but every country’s the same lol

少し前に都電の線路がアスファルト下から出てきたみたいな話題を見てると、年数は違えど何処の国も同じなんだなってwww

You can’t relocate the main roads, so paving right over the top might actually make sense. If you looked, Japan probably has spots where concrete was just laid over cobblestones too.

主要街道は変えられませんし、上にそのまま舗装するのは合理的なのかも。日本も探せば石畳の上に、そのままコンクリ被せたような所あるのかも。

Overlay paving is surprisingly common in this world, you know.

オーバーレイ舗装って意外と多いんだよね世の中

Depends on the place, but partly, yes. Which is why I end up staring at the ground when I go to Europe.

場所にもよるけど、部分的にそう。これだからヨーロッパに行くと地面を凝視しちゃいます。

Entire cities get lifted up in the course of centuries They’ll all eventually be on a hill basically

This kind feels more cultural, or rather historical, so I thought they didn’t need to use asphalt, but maybe it can’t hold up durability-wise? It probably needs maintenance too.

こういうほうが文化というか歴史を感じるからアスファルトにしなくていいと思ったんだけど耐久性的に無理とかあるのかなメンテナンスが必要とかもありそう

“There is a capital beneath the waves, too.” “There is a London beneath the pavement, too.” (The first line is from The Tale of the Heike: as the child emperor Antoku is carried to his death in the sea, his grandmother tells him there is a capital beneath the waves.)

「波の下にも都はございます」「舗装の下にも倫敦はございます」

My take

The streets you walk past every day probably have a whole unexpected world waiting one thin layer down.

#Surprising #Culture

Source & translation note

Comments loosely translated for tone. Reactions collected from Togetter and X threads.

View original thread →