Now Rona Munro, fresh from her success with the James Plays both in Edinburgh and London, considers this crowded square mile, which teemed with human life and where the mills ran both day and night.
It's perfectly located for its role – right beside the City of London, ready to dash to any crisis in that densely crowded square mile, whether it be fire in a high rise or terrorist attack, an experience with which the City is all too familiar, on an immensely expensive block of land that it's hard to imagine the government buying today.
There were also moments of trembling by people crowded into squares of light projected on the floor.
"I'm seeing a very messy and crowded public square, and I think we're going to get more and more of these kinds of conflicts where people who feel they've been excluded want to be heard," said Mr. Haynes, who added that he prefers crowded public squares that welcome religious diversity rather than empty ones.
Chinese crowded the square to watch the dawn flag-raising ceremony that is now a fixture of official patriotic ritual.
Away from the crowded village square, I found this 'makeup artist' focused on applying makeup on a young woman.
In this model, the population density of the most crowded 80 square kilometres is assumed to be at the centre of the country, with hexagons further from the centre having progressively lower population densities.
I asked Mario Calabresi, a celebrated Italian journalist, why young Italians, whose unemployment rate is estimated to be about 27 percent, weren't protesting on the scale of the "indignados," or indignant, who crowd public squares in Spain.
The 29-year-old lives in a modest flat with her boyfriend in Exarcheia, a chaotic bohemia in central Athens where artists, communists and immigrants crowd the squares and anarchists fight frequent street battles with the police.
"I say to all that I have never ceased to love the Bulgarian people," the pope told a throng of well-wishers crowding the square outside Alexander Nevsky Cathedral immediately after arriving from Baku, Azerbaijan.
