Three Minutes Around Pudding Lane, by Laurie Graham

If, like me, you live in ignorance of video games, happy to leave them to a younger generation, I bring to your attention a project that has used game technology to create something rather brilliant: a fly-through of seventeenth century London. Let me explain.

A competition, called Off the Map, was sponsored last year by a videogame company, Crytek, in conjunction with GameCity and the British Library. The challenge was to take one of three themes  -  17^th century London, the Gizeh Pyramids, or Stonehenge  - and to turn maps and old drawings into a 3D experience. The winners were six students from De Montfort University in Leicester. They call themselves Pudding Lane Productions.

You can see their winning entry here. I found it worth watching several times, to catch the painstaking, prizewinning detail. The blacksmith’s tools, the wee loaves of bread, pig carcases complete with flies, the wet mud and yes, the giblets, cabbage stalks and manure, human and animal, that would have been underfoot everywhere. If you're interested in how it was done  -  the craft, not the technology - the group also kept a blog while the work was in progress. When your cobblestones look more like the pebbles on Brighton beach, it’s back to the drawing board.

A fly-through of another era and streets that have changed beyond recognition is something historical novelists try to achieve every time they sit down to write. We may have our maps pinned up above our desks, but a map is just a map. What was it really like in those courts and alleys? Can we even begin to imagine the sounds and smells? Hollywood doesn’t help. The actors still have all their teeth.


The technology used by the Pudding Lane students cannot bring us odours. Not yet, at least.
One of my own rather pointless fears is that if I could suddenly time-travel, even the short distance to my 18^th and 19^th century creations, I wouldn’t much like it there. It would be too noisy, smelly and brutal for my 21^st century sensibilities. A quick look round and I’d want to come home. The past is indeed a foreign country. I'll buy a ticket, but only if it's a guaranteed return. How about you?