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Locations
Geographical situation
Mossgate is located south east of London in the county of Kent. Some minor liberties with geography have been taken (everything inside the echo boundaries is fictional, thus replacing real-life geography there), but that aside Save our Earth geography is exactly the same as the geography of our world's England. In the map below, the echo boundary, the Moss River, and Mossgate proper can be seen in relation to their wider surroundings (click to enlarge).
Weather
This is the weather in Mossgate. At times, plot will affect the weather conditions and make them differ from the ones shown here.
Mossgate
Situated at the mouth of the river Moss, Mossgate is a large harbour town built in the valley that the river has eaten into the chalky cliffs of the Kentish coast at the southern border of England. The town has started to rise up the cliffs to the south, while the northern cliffs are mostly park and, further off the coast, military training grounds. The area of the town has been in constant occupation since pre-Roman times.
The southern part of Mossgate's sea front is taken up by a harbour, large enough to have ferries to France, Spain and even Portugal a few times a week. That aside, it's used by fishing boats and pleasure boats, both private and for rent. Small independent stores, food stalls and restaurants line the harbour.
The historic high street, which runs parallel to the coast on the northern side of the river, suffered the fate of many and lost a lot of traffic to out-of-town shopping centres. However, since the highspeed trainline from London was extended to reach Mossgate a few years ago, it's had a revival and on top of independent and artisan stores, some larger chains have returned (there's even a Primark). North of the historic centre of town, there's a shopping centre called "Riverside Centre".
The next street over runs along the coast and from there, a Victorian pleasure pier extends about 40 metres into the sea. At the pier, there's a historic entertainment hall turned pub. The platform at the end of the pier holds fairground rides such as a merry-go-round, a small rollercoaster and a helter skelter and along the pier kiosks sell candy floss, rock candy, roasted nuts and other goodies. A small distance down the street, a minigolf site can be found and on the street along the coast there are fish and chips shops, family-friendly arcades and souvenir shops.
North of the harbour and the pleasure pier, there is a small sandy beach giving way to a stony one, and when the tides go out twice a day, rock pools are revealed at the bottom of the cliffs, where children like to go and catch crabs (make sure to not get caught by the incoming tide, though! The coast guard is made up of locals and the story of how dumb you were will make the rounds.)
Mossgate boasts a university, Mossgate University, and a number of schools and colleges, among them two expensive boarding schools (that both give stipends to a few less privileged pupils each year).
The town has two museums:
A small Roman museum, located in the bottom floor and basement of a building off the high street. It consists of: A tiny entrance room with a counter where tickets are sold, two small rooms with archaeological finds, a narrow stairway downstairs and the basement. The basement has a glass floor, under which the foundations of the Roman house that used to be located here in former times can be seen. The walls are covered in writing and pictures, trying to evoke an idea of what the house used to look like and how the people in it lived.
The other museum (the Mossgate Town Museum), located where the town centre and the surrounding residential districts bleed into one another, is much less specific, and generally follows the city history: A room dedicated to pre-Roman times (including the remains of a boat that was excavated from the harbour), a room dedicated to Roman times (including a letter from a Roman official assigned to the area that first mentions the river Moss), a room dedicated to medieval times (including Vikings and the time around the battle of Hastings in 1066), a room dedicated to bits and bobs in between (including the gifting and construction of Moss Manor), and then a room that starts with the rise to a favourite seaside leisure destination in the Victorian age and extends to more or less contemporary times. A whole room is dedicated to the ruin on the cliff, talking about how it was used through most phases of Mossgate's existence up until the late 1400s and presenting speculations about its uses. Two whole walls are dedicated to showing networks of trade during the pre-Roman period and talking about methods of transport, explaining how the material that the remaining structures are build of was probably imported by ship from Devon, which, they proudly conclude, must have meant that the people who lived on the cliffs must have been in possession of a good deal of wealth and connections.
It also has a magistrate's court, a theatre, a football stadium, at least one cinema, multiple churches (most, but not all of them Anglican), a public library (located in the back of the Town Museum, a leisure centre, a lido, a shopping centre called Riverside Centre (located by the river at the northern end of the town centre), multiple supermarkets and other everyday shopping facilities, a hospital, various doctor's, lawyer's, etc. offices, and all other facilities that one can expect from a town its size.
The Greens
The Greens is a park to the north of Mossgate, a mostly grassy extended area with sandy paths and some small crops of bushes and low trees climbing up the white cliffs to that side of the town. Where the park melts into the town, a round sandy area with a little bandstand can be found. On top of the cliffs sit ancient ruins, watching out across the Channel. The Guy Fawkes Day bonfire, the summer fête as well as various fairs (a food festival, a literature festival, a music festival, and so on) take place on the Greens. It's a great picnic place.
The bandstand is often used for performances by small bands or other artists, and when not, groups of youth or homeless people like to peruse it on rainy days.
The ruins up the hill, being the main archaeological feature of the town, tend to be where tourists are sent - "take a nice stroll up the cliffs and there's even a bit to look at on top of the view there". It's not much, just a wall and a few blocks of stone remaining, but if one visits the local museum, they'll find a whole room dedicated to the ruins. Every once in a while, the local police station has one or two coppers up there because someone has graffitied it again or the local kids are using it as a party venue (or, most distressingly, to smoke weed).
Mossgate International Business Park
The Business Park is made up of large stores and office buildings which include but are not limited to medical research facilities, a science company, IKEA and other furniture stores, an ASDA (English Walmart), a homeware store, timber merchants, an outpost of a film studio, a gym, a couple of discount stores, a brand pet store, and a couple of stores that sell electronic appliances. It is located to the south of Mossgate and climbs up the cliffs from the town.
RAF station and military training grounds
A Royal Air Force station is located to the north of the town. It is very international and sees quite a lot of use from American and other foreign military that is stationed there long- or short-term. The people stationed there, along with their families, typically live in Mossgate or the surrounding villages.
The area between the station and The Greens is a wooded area that is mostly left to its own devices, but at times used to for troop exercises. Behind the RAF station there is a golf course.
The tunnels
Under the cliffs to the north of Mossgate, there is a tunnel-and-cave system dug into the chalk. It goes back to at least the Napoleonic wars, though scholars assume that parts of it are actually older and might have been used by smugglers before the military built a station behind the cliffs. It has been used in various capacities throughout various wars. During WW1 and WW2, it was used as a military hospital and bunker system for the town. Other uses include military stables, barracks, and similar more mundane uses.
All known entries to the system are sealed with metal grates (to keep the airflow steady that keeps the tunnels from caving in from moisture), and as there have been cave-ins in the past and some of the tunnels remain blocked, and the tunnel system is a maze, it is strictly forbidden to go inside and also heavily advised against.
There are, however, guided tours two times a year (during a week in spring and a week in summer), and some information on the system can be found in the town museum.
Folkton
A small village mostly comprising of big, local families that often have at least one or two members still employed in farming or fishing. Newcomers are treated with friendliness but will likely never manage to truly break into the complex network of the locals, unless they marry into it. The village has an Anglican church, a pub or two, a primary school, a village store with a post office, and some other minor facilities.
The village is located some distance upstream roughly a mile off the Moss River, connected to it only by shallow and slow-travelling stream that the villagers are very defensive over. It's a meeting point for children, youth and adults from not only the village but also Mossgate and other surrounding villages, as it is excellent for canoeing and other water activities.
Folkton was originally built to house the house and ground staff for Moss Manor. It also housed people who farmed the surrounding area that belonged to the Manor.
Moss Manor (the manor)
Moss Manor (the manor) is a large Manor originally built in the Tudor period and famous for its barely altered great hall from that time, after the lands had been granted to the Brassant family by the crown after the War of the Roses. The grand buildings are in good shape and co-owned by English Heritage. A part of them and the grounds can be visited, and a newer building hosting a tourist shop and a cafe has been built near the entrance.
There is also a small menagerie/zoo on the grounds.
Or at least it started out as a menagerie, the hobby of Lady Brassant's father. When he died, the family kept it going in his memory, though they decided to not purchase any new animals and simply let time end it. But then, a while later, Lady Brassant's daughter took an interest in the menagerie and started to both update the facilities to more modern standards of how to keep animals and bring in new animals. Not ones she bought, though. These new animals were rescues - wild animals that due to their injuries couldn't be rehabilitated, circus animals too old for the stage, and so on. Thus these days, one will mostly find species that can be found in the wild in Britain. This includes, for example, otters and wallabies (an invasive species). But there are also a few truly exotic animals, like an old, half blind elephant.
Moss Manor (the village)
Moss Manor (the village) is a small village that grew around a train station on the railway to Mossgate, built so that the Manor could be serviced more directly. It was also used to service and park trains and engines, as there was more space in Moss Manor than in Mossgate itself, and once it was established, some of the more well-off families from Folkton moved to Moss Manor.
...There is not a drop of good blood between the villages. Folkton are the backwards, uneducated country bumpkins, whereas the people from Moss Manor consist of posh toffs that are born with silver spoons in their mouths. (Technically, both villages historically are made up of very similar people. Just don't try to tell that to a local.) Football matches between the two villages almost always end in brawls, you just don't move onto the wrong side of the river (this extends to people that move to Mossgate - former Moss Manor residents stay on the northern shore of the Moss, former Folkton residents stay on the southern shore), when the kids meet for the first time in secondary school (neither village has one, so they have to commute to Mossgate), there are always spats during breaks. And so on.
The village has an Anglican church, a pub or two, an elementary school, a village store with a post office, and some other minor facilities.
Tarwich
For the most part, Tarwich is made up of new developments - that is, there are three houses (one of which used to be a mill) that comprise the original Tarwich, and oodles of houses that were built by the dozen by investors since the war. Every seven years or so, Tarwich gets another bunch, and the village is dangerously close to just growing into the outskirts of Mossgate.
The village is located along the north-eastern shore of the river Moss and has a pub or two and a few corner shops, a primary school, as well as a community centre with a big multi-function hall that is used as a church, a party room, a mosque, and for any other kind of social gathering.
Moss Army Fort
About one mile off the mouth of the river, a group of structures rises above the sea. The Moss Army Fort (a twin structure of the Shivering Sands Army Fort) consists of six box-shaped, multi-storied buildings on stilts that were built during the war to defend the mouth of the Moss river. The structures have no stairs or ladders that they could be climbed on. While they are in good shape considering that they have not seen any maintenance done on them for decades, that does not mean that they are necessarily safe any more. Access is thus forbidden (though not impossible). The coast guard will rescue you if you find yourself in danger due to climbing them, but they will also point and laugh and gossip.
Transport
The high street and some streets around it are pedestrian areas during daytime, and the whole town centre and surrounding areas have a layout that makes it highly inadvisable to use anything but one's feet/a wheelchair/etc or, outside of the pedestrian areas, bicycles.
The most convenient way of getting to London or any place along the coast is to take the train. Mossgate is a station on the train line that runs along the coast and the final destination of a train line to London (which is also serviced by Southeastern's high speed trains). It's not only faster, or similarly fast, as taking a car, it also means that you don't need to pay horrendous parking fees (plus, for London, the congestion charge) after searching for a parking spot forever. The same goes for any international destination - the Eurostar (change at Ashford or St Pancras) is the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to get to Paris, Lille or Brussels, and all airports in and around London are accessible by train Luton aside, but Luton stinks. This is a personal opinion of Kira-mod and should be discounted.
The ferries departing from the harbour can bring you to the Channel Islands, Northern Spain and France. They are mostly interesting if one wishes to take their car along on a trip, likes ferries, or is a lorry driver. Ferry rides take between ten and 24 hours.
A car is the sensible choice if one wishes to get somewhere between midnight and half past five in the morning, if one goes to comparatively remote places in the countryside, if large amounts of goods need to be transported, and so forth. If a car is only needed very infrequently, taxis or rental cars are easy to get.
Map
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Please comment to this post with the form in the textarea below and give us a description of your location/facility/etc. Feel free to include links and/or pictures.
Mossgate is located south east of London in the county of Kent. Some minor liberties with geography have been taken (everything inside the echo boundaries is fictional, thus replacing real-life geography there), but that aside Save our Earth geography is exactly the same as the geography of our world's England. In the map below, the echo boundary, the Moss River, and Mossgate proper can be seen in relation to their wider surroundings (click to enlarge).
Weather
This is the weather in Mossgate. At times, plot will affect the weather conditions and make them differ from the ones shown here.
Mossgate
Situated at the mouth of the river Moss, Mossgate is a large harbour town built in the valley that the river has eaten into the chalky cliffs of the Kentish coast at the southern border of England. The town has started to rise up the cliffs to the south, while the northern cliffs are mostly park and, further off the coast, military training grounds. The area of the town has been in constant occupation since pre-Roman times.
The southern part of Mossgate's sea front is taken up by a harbour, large enough to have ferries to France, Spain and even Portugal a few times a week. That aside, it's used by fishing boats and pleasure boats, both private and for rent. Small independent stores, food stalls and restaurants line the harbour.
The historic high street, which runs parallel to the coast on the northern side of the river, suffered the fate of many and lost a lot of traffic to out-of-town shopping centres. However, since the highspeed trainline from London was extended to reach Mossgate a few years ago, it's had a revival and on top of independent and artisan stores, some larger chains have returned (there's even a Primark). North of the historic centre of town, there's a shopping centre called "Riverside Centre".
The next street over runs along the coast and from there, a Victorian pleasure pier extends about 40 metres into the sea. At the pier, there's a historic entertainment hall turned pub. The platform at the end of the pier holds fairground rides such as a merry-go-round, a small rollercoaster and a helter skelter and along the pier kiosks sell candy floss, rock candy, roasted nuts and other goodies. A small distance down the street, a minigolf site can be found and on the street along the coast there are fish and chips shops, family-friendly arcades and souvenir shops.
North of the harbour and the pleasure pier, there is a small sandy beach giving way to a stony one, and when the tides go out twice a day, rock pools are revealed at the bottom of the cliffs, where children like to go and catch crabs (make sure to not get caught by the incoming tide, though! The coast guard is made up of locals and the story of how dumb you were will make the rounds.)
Mossgate boasts a university, Mossgate University, and a number of schools and colleges, among them two expensive boarding schools (that both give stipends to a few less privileged pupils each year).
The town has two museums:
A small Roman museum, located in the bottom floor and basement of a building off the high street. It consists of: A tiny entrance room with a counter where tickets are sold, two small rooms with archaeological finds, a narrow stairway downstairs and the basement. The basement has a glass floor, under which the foundations of the Roman house that used to be located here in former times can be seen. The walls are covered in writing and pictures, trying to evoke an idea of what the house used to look like and how the people in it lived.
The other museum (the Mossgate Town Museum), located where the town centre and the surrounding residential districts bleed into one another, is much less specific, and generally follows the city history: A room dedicated to pre-Roman times (including the remains of a boat that was excavated from the harbour), a room dedicated to Roman times (including a letter from a Roman official assigned to the area that first mentions the river Moss), a room dedicated to medieval times (including Vikings and the time around the battle of Hastings in 1066), a room dedicated to bits and bobs in between (including the gifting and construction of Moss Manor), and then a room that starts with the rise to a favourite seaside leisure destination in the Victorian age and extends to more or less contemporary times. A whole room is dedicated to the ruin on the cliff, talking about how it was used through most phases of Mossgate's existence up until the late 1400s and presenting speculations about its uses. Two whole walls are dedicated to showing networks of trade during the pre-Roman period and talking about methods of transport, explaining how the material that the remaining structures are build of was probably imported by ship from Devon, which, they proudly conclude, must have meant that the people who lived on the cliffs must have been in possession of a good deal of wealth and connections.
It also has a magistrate's court, a theatre, a football stadium, at least one cinema, multiple churches (most, but not all of them Anglican), a public library (located in the back of the Town Museum, a leisure centre, a lido, a shopping centre called Riverside Centre (located by the river at the northern end of the town centre), multiple supermarkets and other everyday shopping facilities, a hospital, various doctor's, lawyer's, etc. offices, and all other facilities that one can expect from a town its size.
The Greens
The Greens is a park to the north of Mossgate, a mostly grassy extended area with sandy paths and some small crops of bushes and low trees climbing up the white cliffs to that side of the town. Where the park melts into the town, a round sandy area with a little bandstand can be found. On top of the cliffs sit ancient ruins, watching out across the Channel. The Guy Fawkes Day bonfire, the summer fête as well as various fairs (a food festival, a literature festival, a music festival, and so on) take place on the Greens. It's a great picnic place.
The bandstand is often used for performances by small bands or other artists, and when not, groups of youth or homeless people like to peruse it on rainy days.
The ruins up the hill, being the main archaeological feature of the town, tend to be where tourists are sent - "take a nice stroll up the cliffs and there's even a bit to look at on top of the view there". It's not much, just a wall and a few blocks of stone remaining, but if one visits the local museum, they'll find a whole room dedicated to the ruins. Every once in a while, the local police station has one or two coppers up there because someone has graffitied it again or the local kids are using it as a party venue (or, most distressingly, to smoke weed).
Mossgate International Business Park
The Business Park is made up of large stores and office buildings which include but are not limited to medical research facilities, a science company, IKEA and other furniture stores, an ASDA (English Walmart), a homeware store, timber merchants, an outpost of a film studio, a gym, a couple of discount stores, a brand pet store, and a couple of stores that sell electronic appliances. It is located to the south of Mossgate and climbs up the cliffs from the town.
RAF station and military training grounds
A Royal Air Force station is located to the north of the town. It is very international and sees quite a lot of use from American and other foreign military that is stationed there long- or short-term. The people stationed there, along with their families, typically live in Mossgate or the surrounding villages.
The area between the station and The Greens is a wooded area that is mostly left to its own devices, but at times used to for troop exercises. Behind the RAF station there is a golf course.
The tunnels
Under the cliffs to the north of Mossgate, there is a tunnel-and-cave system dug into the chalk. It goes back to at least the Napoleonic wars, though scholars assume that parts of it are actually older and might have been used by smugglers before the military built a station behind the cliffs. It has been used in various capacities throughout various wars. During WW1 and WW2, it was used as a military hospital and bunker system for the town. Other uses include military stables, barracks, and similar more mundane uses.
All known entries to the system are sealed with metal grates (to keep the airflow steady that keeps the tunnels from caving in from moisture), and as there have been cave-ins in the past and some of the tunnels remain blocked, and the tunnel system is a maze, it is strictly forbidden to go inside and also heavily advised against.
There are, however, guided tours two times a year (during a week in spring and a week in summer), and some information on the system can be found in the town museum.
Folkton
A small village mostly comprising of big, local families that often have at least one or two members still employed in farming or fishing. Newcomers are treated with friendliness but will likely never manage to truly break into the complex network of the locals, unless they marry into it. The village has an Anglican church, a pub or two, a primary school, a village store with a post office, and some other minor facilities.
The village is located some distance upstream roughly a mile off the Moss River, connected to it only by shallow and slow-travelling stream that the villagers are very defensive over. It's a meeting point for children, youth and adults from not only the village but also Mossgate and other surrounding villages, as it is excellent for canoeing and other water activities.
Folkton was originally built to house the house and ground staff for Moss Manor. It also housed people who farmed the surrounding area that belonged to the Manor.
Moss Manor (the manor)
Moss Manor (the manor) is a large Manor originally built in the Tudor period and famous for its barely altered great hall from that time, after the lands had been granted to the Brassant family by the crown after the War of the Roses. The grand buildings are in good shape and co-owned by English Heritage. A part of them and the grounds can be visited, and a newer building hosting a tourist shop and a cafe has been built near the entrance.
There is also a small menagerie/zoo on the grounds.
Or at least it started out as a menagerie, the hobby of Lady Brassant's father. When he died, the family kept it going in his memory, though they decided to not purchase any new animals and simply let time end it. But then, a while later, Lady Brassant's daughter took an interest in the menagerie and started to both update the facilities to more modern standards of how to keep animals and bring in new animals. Not ones she bought, though. These new animals were rescues - wild animals that due to their injuries couldn't be rehabilitated, circus animals too old for the stage, and so on. Thus these days, one will mostly find species that can be found in the wild in Britain. This includes, for example, otters and wallabies (an invasive species). But there are also a few truly exotic animals, like an old, half blind elephant.
Moss Manor (the village)
Moss Manor (the village) is a small village that grew around a train station on the railway to Mossgate, built so that the Manor could be serviced more directly. It was also used to service and park trains and engines, as there was more space in Moss Manor than in Mossgate itself, and once it was established, some of the more well-off families from Folkton moved to Moss Manor.
...There is not a drop of good blood between the villages. Folkton are the backwards, uneducated country bumpkins, whereas the people from Moss Manor consist of posh toffs that are born with silver spoons in their mouths. (Technically, both villages historically are made up of very similar people. Just don't try to tell that to a local.) Football matches between the two villages almost always end in brawls, you just don't move onto the wrong side of the river (this extends to people that move to Mossgate - former Moss Manor residents stay on the northern shore of the Moss, former Folkton residents stay on the southern shore), when the kids meet for the first time in secondary school (neither village has one, so they have to commute to Mossgate), there are always spats during breaks. And so on.
The village has an Anglican church, a pub or two, an elementary school, a village store with a post office, and some other minor facilities.
Tarwich
For the most part, Tarwich is made up of new developments - that is, there are three houses (one of which used to be a mill) that comprise the original Tarwich, and oodles of houses that were built by the dozen by investors since the war. Every seven years or so, Tarwich gets another bunch, and the village is dangerously close to just growing into the outskirts of Mossgate.
The village is located along the north-eastern shore of the river Moss and has a pub or two and a few corner shops, a primary school, as well as a community centre with a big multi-function hall that is used as a church, a party room, a mosque, and for any other kind of social gathering.
Moss Army Fort
About one mile off the mouth of the river, a group of structures rises above the sea. The Moss Army Fort (a twin structure of the Shivering Sands Army Fort) consists of six box-shaped, multi-storied buildings on stilts that were built during the war to defend the mouth of the Moss river. The structures have no stairs or ladders that they could be climbed on. While they are in good shape considering that they have not seen any maintenance done on them for decades, that does not mean that they are necessarily safe any more. Access is thus forbidden (though not impossible). The coast guard will rescue you if you find yourself in danger due to climbing them, but they will also point and laugh and gossip.
Transport
- A good way of getting around the Echo Boundary is to take the bus. Stagecoach services the whole area.
- Longer distance buses run hourly or half-hourly to destinations further afield, stopping only a few times before leaving the echo boundary.
- Shorter distance buses, called "Little & Often", run every couple of minutes and service an area that covers roughly the echo boundary. They're small 15-seaters with an empty area in the front that can hold one wheelchair or pram and a few standing passengers. They go through the neighbourhoods of Mossgate, the business park, the villages, the Manor and to the RAF station. They stop specifically at all shopping destinations outside the town centre (there's a stop called ASDA and another called IKEA, for example).
- Parents of school children are offered the opportunity to buy a cheap yearly bus pass at the beginning of each school year that allow the child to travel for free within the Mossgate Council area (= the Echo Boundary). Disabled and elderly people can apply for a free bus pass from the council. Persons on jobseekers get a card that can be loaded with "virtual bus money" at the jobcenter and can only be used to pay for buses within the Mossgate Council area.
- Longer distance buses run hourly or half-hourly to destinations further afield, stopping only a few times before leaving the echo boundary.
Map
1 Mossgate 2 Tarwich 3 Mossgate International Business Park 4 Folkton 5 Moss Manor (village) 6 Moss Manor (manor) 7 RAF station 8 Ruins with Green 9 Moss Army Fort 10 Pleasure Pier 11 Mossgate Harbour A Moss B Little Moss C Royal Military Canal Yellow = elevated areas Green = low, marshy land Darker Green = wooded land belonging to the RAF base White = tail of Dungeness |
Please comment to this post with the form in the textarea below and give us a description of your location/facility/etc. Feel free to include links and/or pictures.
Pinewood Studios Mossgate
Location: Mossgate International Industrial Centre
Affiliated character(s): TBA
Description:
Pinewood Studios Mossgate is an outpost of the British film and television studio Pinewood Studios, located in the industrial centre of Mossgate.
It includes two large buildings. One of them holds multiple boats. The other contains offices, a conference room, a large convertible stage, a smaller wet stage and a huge storage area that holds everything that is needed to turn the convertible stage into the inside of one of the ships in the other building and a ton of other props and costumes.
The outpost is mainly used to shoot seaside/water parts of Pinewood productions ranging from feature films to TV adverts and is sometimes borrowed by other companies (the cliffs around Mossgate are especially popular as a stand-in for the cliffs of Dover). It employs craftspeople, office staff, security, and all other professions required to run the place.