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The city of Victoria is Beringia's second city and has been so for a long time, since shovels entered the ground in 1859. As Beringia's southernmost major metropolis and largest seaport, it was a candidate for capital for some time, and indeed remains the second-largest city in the nation. The community sits atop a rugged peninsula straddling Golden Horn Bay, jutting into the northern edge of the Sea of Japan. It's easy to lose the skyline beneath the shadow of modernity. The immense tower that is One Mayport Place looms over the city centre, and other modern towers locate around it, among them the triangular Dominion Pacific Tower with its glass-and-gold facade. But these towers stand against the traces of an older history. Tucked against the back of the great silver wedge known as the Victoria World Finance Centre are a number of four- and five-storey tenements from the 1860s. The new tower, built in the 1990s, was constructed right up against them. Other old tenements like this peek out of the cityscape here and there... and yet in other areas, modernity has simply taken over. In writing the architectural history of Victoria - and indeed, the entire history of Beringia - a particular pen is dug deeply into the page. Image source: U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.488.159.009 Beringia extends down to the northern end of the Sea of Japan and includes the island of Sakhalin - both regions coveted by what was then Imperial Japan. When war broke out, Japan viewed Beringia as a natural co-belligerent of Great Britain - and it not only viewed Sakhalin as its rightful territory, but saw in Beringian cities the opportunity for the Allies to attack the Home Islands straight away. Almost as soon as the war began, Japanese bombers stationed in occupied Korea appeared in the skies over Victoria. On paper, Victoria was not unready for war, the city being an eastern Royal Navy post and a major centre even in the 1930s. The hill near the city centre is known as Victoria Rock, and in its day it was built up with fortifications - anti-ship guns, anti-air guns, artillery cannons and defensive walls. Other such bastions were located in the area, too. But with Beringia far from the core of the British Empire, many of these weapons were out-of-date, the fortifications were inadequate to the rigors of modern war, and the men manning them simply weren't ready. Much of the fortification structure built on Victoria Rock is gone now, but the core western station has been restored for display. This station exchanged fire with Japanese ships in the bay and aircraft overhead before being overrun by landing troops. The bombing raids and the subsequent Battle of Victoria are why the modern metropolis has lost so much of its historic core. Yet survivors exist - none more iconic than Winchester Street Station. Sitting at the terminus of the Trans-Beringia Railroad, Winchester Street Station has stood for nearly 130 years as of 2023. Astonishingly, the immense station survived the onslaught of bombs. Hundreds of Victoria residents took shelter in the station as bombs and shells decimated much of the rest of the city. The station took a few hits, one blowing a hole in the primary dome - but it miraculously still stood. When Japanese troops made landfall, the fighting culminated in front of the station as Beringian troops fought valiantly, but hopelessly, to hold it. The Battle of Victoria is commemorated today with a votive column across from the station. Mounted with it is a replica Spitfire, one of a handful that took part in the defense of the city. Victoria, however, was only the first course. With Victoria occupied, Japanese troops made landfall in south Sakhalin and began taking territory - but as Beringia regrouped, they established a supply route between the mainland and Sakhalin's west-central coast. The Chaddea region has always been the major centre of shipping to Sakhalin. These days, much cargo travels to the island via a rail ferry based in Sagicha, part of greater Chaddea's northern district. But in 1940, shipping went through Chaddea proper - and rail traffic to Chaddea crossed the rugged Sikhote-Alin mountains to get there. That meant weaving across rocky coast and mountain rivers to make it to port. Above, the railroad to Chaddea crosses the mouth of the Chaddea River. This bridge hasn't changed much since 1940 - it carries heavy freight and passenger traffic to the seaport in central Chaddea. It also crosses very close to Barracuda Bay, the main body of water opening up into the Strait of Tartary. The Japanese could read maps as well as anyone else. With their troops bogged down in Sakhalin against dug-in Beringian troops being resupplied through Chaddea, the imperative was clear. Destroy the Chaddea River Rail Bridge. Chaddea at the time was no longer Beringia's capital, it having moved to Bolliton years before. From 1940 onward, it became a veritable fortress. Gun batteries were set up throughout the region, reinforcing lighter defenses set up in years prior. This gun battery was set up on Cape Two Brothers, a rugged outcrop sheltering the city proper and facing out onto the Strait of Tartary. The position was quickly defended with concrete chunks and sandbags, and a pair of old battleship guns were rolled up and hastily set into place. Anti-aircraft guns also operated here, though they're long gone now, leaving only the decommissioned and battle-damaged anti-ship guns. In their time, these weapons duelled with Japanese ships in the Strait. Today, these guns are rusting away and overgrown, but avid climbers can visit them. They are just one such site around Chaddea - but not the most vital. That would be the Battle of Chaddea National Historic Site, located just north of the Chaddea River Bridge. Several fortified sites were set up around the bridge. The National Historic Site is built around the most famous, known as Battery Bravo. Loaded with movable floodlights, modern shore guns and flak batteries, and even a radar site, the battery withstood wave after wave of Japanese attacks on the bridge. The mounted Spitfire is no replica this time - it flew from what is now Chaddea-Sagicha International Airport, just a few kilometres to the north, and took part in several duels over the bridge. The number of actual raids was too high to count. The Battle itself, in late 1942, was singular but massive, a decisive thrust aimed to destroy the bridge. The monuments at the historic site commemorate those who took part. The reflecting pool is a dedication to all those who lost their lives in defense of the city. The votive pillar is dedicated to the Royal Amur Rifles, the regiment at the heart of the hardest fighting. The Spitfire memorializes the valiant efforts of the Royal Beringian Air Force in defending the bridge. Even the observation tower is a monument: The room at the top holds a memorial to the Yukaghir Rifles, a regiment of ethnic Yukaghirs from northern Siberia who served in Chaddea as snipers, lurking in the woods to hunt down Axis saboteur squads. As for the stairs, they lead down to perhaps the largest monument on site. HMBS Headstrong is an old interwar destroyer seconded to Beringia by the Royal Navy well ahead of the conflict. During the attacks on Beringia, the Headstrong was part of the defending fleet. She was there during the decisive battle. On paper, the old and battered Headstrong was not supposed to be a match for the Imperial Japanese Navy. In practice, she barreled ahead and duelled directly with a Japanese heavy cruiser. Her lucky torpedo hits blew the stern off the cruiser and caused it to capsize in the harbour, impeding Japanese landing craft from getting past her. The fortunate hit put a large chunk of the Japanese navy and amphibious troops out of the fight. Eventually the Headstrong was struck by dive-bombers and partially sunk on the river's edge. She was raised after the battle and drydocked, but restored as a museum ship beginning in 1947. Today, visitors can walk her decks and visit her bridge on guided tours. The Headstrong is a living victory monument. She and the Beringian forces won on that day in 1942. The Chaddea River Bridge emerged still standing. It would stand through the entire war. In contrast to the coastal war, Bolliton proper was relatively unbothered. Japan left matters on the Amur to their proxies in Manchukuo, who lacked the manpower for more than a few raids. These were easily contained, but airfields were still established inland - not only for defense, but to train pilots. John Oszypko Regional Airport, on Big Ussuri Island in metro Bolliton, is one of these Second World War-era aerodromes in a grown-up form. Its triangular layout is based on the typical arrangement of the day - a runway for each wind direction. These days, nobody flies Hurricanes and Spitfires from Oszypko anymore. The airport is a business terminal, serving mainly turboprops and Learjets and connecting passengers to metro Bolliton by ferry. The airport's namesake, Major John Oszypko, was one of the Royal Beringian Air Force's heroes and the country's third-leading ace. Fighting mainly over the Strait of Tartary and flying a Spitfire, he downed 25.5 aircraft before being shot down himself over Hokkaido in 1945. His body was never recovered, but he was posthumously awarded Beringia's highest honour, the Bering Cross. His efforts came as Beringia pushed south in the late years of the war. The battle to retake Victoria was the final true fight on Beringian soil, coming in spring 1945 - just as the Americans launched their campaign for Okinawa. The Allies knew the same thing Japan did at the war's outset: Allied bombers could make it to the Japanese Home Islands and back without much issue. As the Japanese ran out of ships and pilots, Beringian and American forces swept through the Tartary Straight and down through the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, retaking cities and towns along the way before finally arriving in Victoria. The honour of retaking the city fell to the Kincardine Regiment, an ethnically mixed unit based in the city of Kincardine in metro Bolliton, supported by the Royal Beringian Navy and Air Force and a group of American allies. By May of 1945, the last Japanese forces in the city surrendered. The front page of every newspaper in Beringia featured a photo of an ethnic Nanai corpsman hoisting the Union Jack above the most impressive standing building in town... Winchester Street Station. Eurocopter AS365 Dauphin model: Antti Pankkonen, John Devins & Keith Devins Chaddea, meanwhile, is no longer a fortress - but the Royal Beringian Coast Guard maintains an important base there. These days they're not warding off fighter attacks, merely rescuing lost sailors and haranguing fishermen who overfish their quotas. Here, Dauphin helicopters of the RBCG stand ready to take off, with rescue cabling ready to be loaded up. The port facilities at Chaddea are also used by the Coast Guard's icebreakers, especially during the warmer months when there's less ice to break. The larger and taller of the two, BCGS Paul D. Anisimov, is Beringia's oldest active icebreaker, serving since the 1970s with little sign of slowdown. Her icebreaking capacity isn't as great as more modern ships in the fleet, but her spacious superstructure provides ample room for Arctic research. The ship spends much of the cold season up north, though her hull's yellow colour has grown faded over the years from the strain put on her. The other, lower-slung ship is a more modern icebreaker: BCGS Ellison Irgen-Gioro, named for a prominent Arctic explorer of the postwar era, is one of three identical icebreakers built in the late 2000s and early 2010s to handle heavy ice far to the north. She can steadily break her way through two metres of heavy ice without stopping and has space for a Dauphin helicopter on her aft deck. As for Victoria, she wears the scars of war among the glittering regalia of Beringia's second city. Golden Horn Bay is once again a bustling hub of traffic, overlooked by a unique and rugged city abloom with cherry blossom trees - the city is richly populated by Prunus sargentii, a variety of cherry tree endemic to Hokkaido, Sakhalin and Korea. Historic buildings continue to nestle among the glittering towers erected in the years following 1945. Cruise ships happily sail in and out, carrying tourists from around the world. Many of those tourists come from Japan now. The scars of war do not cut so deep that the bleeding cannot end. Some grievances still exist - war crimes inflicted without apologies, battles that leave bad tastes in the history books - but the Beringia of the modern era looks to Japan as a friend. Freighters from Tokyo and cruise ships from Osaka ply their way to Victoria to visit the city known as the San Francisco of the Far East. A substantial Japanese-Beringian community lives here now, forming an integral and vibrant part of the city's life. Nevertheless, those who walk the waterfront in the city's centre will inevitably see Royal Beringian Navy ships docked at their stations. The enemies may be different in the future - Beijing, still surly about the last of the Unequal Treaties, looms large in the minds of Beringian policymakers. But Beringia can read its own history - and it can take away lessons for the history still to be written.
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Wayman Chom International Airport is the main airport servicing Bolliton and its metropolitan area. Named for the first Prime Minister of Beringia to come from Asian background, the airport lies in the northeastern part of the city, north of the borough of Hasikta. Chom International is a four-runway airport: It features two heavy east-west runways and a couple of narrower ones running NE/SW. These flight paths impose height and massing restrictions on nearby city boroughs, most keenly felt in the borough of Severnina west of the main runways: Towers there aren't permitted to be built above a certain number of storeys somewhere in the midrise neighbourhood, adding on to a buffer of low-emitting industry that clusters near the airport. The main part of the airport is divided up into four main terminal arms. Arms A and B are pictured here. C and D continue off to the right, but section A - at the bottom - likely serves the most aircraft overall. It handles mainly smaller aircraft on shorter and medium-haul routes, including a few across national borders, mainly to China or Korea. A few Air Canada jets will sometimes make the haul from British Columbia, too. Two local tenants in Section A both operate the Airbus A220-300/Bombardier CS300. Air Beringia is Beringia's flag carrier and the largest airline in the country, operating the A220-300 mainly on medium-haul routes to destinations in eastern and southern Beringia. This one's destined to fly west on a flight to the city of Ziah, near the Bira River. The berth next door is handling an A220-300 flying for Sakha Avia, a smaller domestic airline based in Yakutsk. This immense region was integrated into Beringia late, breaking off from the former Russian Empire during the post-First World War civil conflict and eventually confederating with Beringia as the Sakha Province. Sakha Avia jets like these longer-haul A220s will routinely make the near-2000-kilometre haul from Yakutsk to Bolliton, crossing vast eastern taiga and tundra along the way. (This model and paint kit were originally designed by Camil Valiquette; the liveries and model conversion are my own.) Section B is dedicated to Air Beringia's larger aircraft. The airline operates a decent-sized fleet of Airbus A330s - you can see a few A330-200s, distinguished by their greyer wing patterns and weathering. In recent years they've been supplemented by new Boeing 787 Dreamliners and even newer Airbus A350-1000s. Air Beringia's aircraft in the modern era wear a halftone gradient in the colours of the flag, with the tailfin prominently displaying the head of an Amur tiger. The A350s operate on Air Beringia's longest-haul routes: They carry passengers from Bolliton to major destinations like Los Angeles, New York, Delhi and Sydney. The airline has a few more of them on order. (Credits: These use Thomas Ruth's freeware A330-200 model and Camil Valiquette's A350-1000 and 787-8 models.) Section C entirely handles international flights, including the biggest jets Chom International can handle. Beringia sees significant travel from Asia: Aside from frequent visits from Korea, the region has deep ties to Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. A not-insignificant number of Beringians are descendants of Southeast Asians from former British dependencies who arrived as migrants during and after World War II. Families will routinely travel between countries to keep those ties alive. Further down the spur, jets from Europe and the Americas also turn up, with Air Canada and US Airways being regulars - there's a regular flight between Bolliton and Ottawa, for example. Finally, Terminal D, handling a mix of international and domestic flights. The big local tenant is Beringia's second-largest airline, Songko Air. This airline derives its name from the Manchu word for "hawk" and was started up following the Second World War by Manchu veterans of the Royal Beringian Air Force with a handful of decommissioned Lancasters converted for passenger duty. The company grew from there and today competes with Air Beringia despite a relative lack of government subsidy. Songko offers an incredibly popular route between Bolliton and Tijuana and actually dominates Air Beringia in servicing certain Asian and Oceanic routes: If you want to fly to Mongolia, Pakistan, Fiji or Tahiti, Songko will get you there more reliably and with better prices. Their prosperity over the years has depended on getting into holes that Air Beringia has overlooked and servicing the hell out of them. Also present at Section D? BEARS! Aeroflot has a couple of dedicated jetways here. Russia and Beringia aren't the best of friends - Moscow's still hissy about Yakutia and occasionally haunts Beringia with patrolling jets, spy balloons and frankly unreasonable amounts of coverage on RT - but for the most part the two countries coexist in a state of moderate acceptance of each other's existence. It's eased by cultural ties and the commonality of Russian as a second language. A couple other Russian airlines turn up at Chom now and then - if you're lucky you'll spot one of Rossiya Airlines' rare Ilyushin Il-96 liners flying in. Notably, Chom International also services a regular Ukraine International Airlines route between Bolliton and Kyiv. That one you'll get to see when I actually find a livery for it. Two satellite boarding areas are accessed through both an underground tunnel and a back entrance by road. Section E is currently being worked on, but section F is dedicated to business jets and turboprops. This is a relatively smaller section of what Chom International provides, though; business flights mostly fly out of a smaller airport in the region. Aside from passengers, Chom International also moves cargo, and no one in the city moves more of it than UPS. The company operates a large cargo terminal on the northwest corner of the massive airport property. There's a smaller FedEx cargo depot to the west of it, while a more general rental cargo space eastward services a rolling mix of smaller cargo providers. Aside from the models I shamelessly converted (for personal and non-commercial use!), I could not have done this update without Scaley McSlither, Lucario Boricua and Ulisse teaching me new skills.
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The Dominion of Beringia has gone through a few capital cities over the years, ever since the capture of the Far East and Outer Manchuria following the Crimean War. Once a sparsely-peopled region disputed between Russia and China, the area steadily expanded - and the capital moved with it. From September 1854 to mid-1859, the capital of the so-called Far East Territory - later the Colony of Beringia - was situated at Petropavlovsk itself. The old Russian settlement has steadily been subsumed into the larger city of Priceport, named for the British officer who spearheaded the settlement's capture. You can see the old colonial administration on the waterfront, just north of the old Church of All Saints: the so-called Colonial House is now a museum. The capital didn't stay in Priceport for long - the fort, on the Kamchatka Peninsula, was basically in the middle of nowhere relative to more southerly lands ceded to the British in various treaties with Russia and China. Nevertheless, the city developed over the years into both a major port and services hub. It is the easternmost major city in the country now, with a bustling central business district. Distance and geography always made the former Petropavlovsk a forbidding choice for capital. For one, the Kamchatka Peninsula is far removed from just about anything, with a brutal northern climate and few lands around it worth settling. For another, the port is situated in a rugged volcanic region on Avacha Bay, and while it's possible to farm the river itself, the rest of the region is cold and hilly. The city winds through volcanic valleys and along black volcanic sand beaches, sustaining itself with countless little ports - fisheries, resource ports, military bases, et cetera. Even in its short time as capital, Priceport held value, though: It was a useful early hub of fur trading and mining, and a Royal Navy detachment remained stationed there in perpetuity. These days the Royal Beringian Navy keeps ships on station, seen above. Sadly the city itself isn't the most wealthy: It's cold, it's remote, and it smells like fish a lot of the time. Priceport has no shortage of historic spots. The Petropavlovsk Battery is one of them. The British installed these guns after the First World War, but they were silent until the Second World War, when the city's defenders duelled attacking Japanese ships in one of the northernmost attacks of the war. But their history goes back further: It was this battery that the Russians manned against the British during the Crimean War. The Siege of Petropavlovsk is honoured by a series of plaques mounted on the equestrian statue. By 1859, the sheer remoteness of Petropavlovsk and the need to secure the more productive and hospitable lands in Outer Manchuria saw the British administration hunting for a better capital than modern Priceport. They turned their attention to what is now the city of Chaddea. The Chaddea-Sagicha metro region is built around a multi-inlet bay opening up onto the Tartar Strait. The body of water, known to the Russians as Imperatorskaya Gavan, was the site of a small fort, which was burned by British ships in 1854. The area was renamed Barracuda Bay in honour of HMS Barracouta, the lead ship involved in the attack. In fact the native name for the region, in the tongue of the local Orochs, is Khadzhi or Khodyo - a name that has been bastardized into Chaddea over the years. Either way, its excellent natural harbour and sheltered location made it a place of interest for the British Empire, who moved the colonial administration here and set up what was then called Fort Eastern. The village of Chaddea developed around it and came to subsume it. The city of Chaddea has today rounded into an important port on the eastern seaboard and a key cargo and passenger rail terminus. Pictured here is the downtown, much of which emerged in the early 1900s. The heritage St. Justus Cathedral, built in the 1880s, is a key landmark in downtown Chaddea, located just south of Chaddea Grand Station. The original church has since been added onto by a large rectory, which itself backs on to the 1880s Queen Victoria Hotel, one of the oldest and most luxurious buildings in town. Across the rail line sits the 1868 building known as Britannia Hall, once the centre of colonial administration in Chaddea. Colonial administrators never truly loved assignment to Beringia. The towns were small and cold, requiring buildings to be constructed with brick and stone. The old governor's house still survives in central Chaddea, overlooking part of Barracuda Bay and perched above one of the rail lines feeding the city's many port facilities. For all that Chaddea remains in use today - indeed, even absorbing the nearby Sagicha Inlet to form a major eastern port serving Sakhalin Island - the city was rapidly overtaken in importance. British fortunes steadily turned to the Amur River and the more prosperous and promising farmland opened up along the river's lower reaches. As British explorers and settlers pushed inland and the local Tungusic peoples signed treaties of recognition with the Crown (many of them in bad faith on perfidious Albion's part), a new capital was needed, one closer to the action. Britain finally designated its new capital in 1887: Bolliton. The region was then a small village known to the locals as Boli or Buri, but held potential as a transit hub between promising farmlands on the Amur River and ports open to the Sea of Japan and the Tartar Strait. By the 1890s, administration had moved to the top of Chapel Crest in what is now the Bolliton borough of Georgetown, just north of New Amurside. These days, Chapel Crest has a tunnel boring under it and an expressway barreling past, but much of the hill itself has been set aside as a national heritage site. Burroughs Hall, once the site of the colonial legislature, is today home to the National Library of Beringia. The smaller building next door was once the Superior Court of the Far East Colony. It remained in use as a courthouse for years but is today part of the National Library and a common site for wedding photos. Weddings in fact still take place at the church here, though the cemetery's considered full.
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Midtowns and Movement: Bolliton's Inner Boroughs
PlanetOfHats posted a City Journal entry in Beringia
The city of Bolliton is divided into administrative boroughs. The city centre is far from the only hub of activity; the central business district is ringed by a bustling network of dense boroughs and unique neighbourhoods, connected by roads, rails and subways. The southern part of Gates Park borough, on the southeast corner of downtown. Boroughs like Gates Park are generally of medium density, with a lot of brownstone development that's cropped up over the years. That said, there's still infill going on here, as demonstrated by the visible scaffolding. On the southern edge of Gates Park, you'll find the old Bolliton Arena. This complex used to be home to the Bolliton Tigers before the construction of the downtown PNEBank Centre. These days the old arena is home to a couple of junior sports teams and sees use as a conference centre and concert venue. Stuff like auto shows will come here. Old industrial neighbourhoods like this one in central Gates Park dot Bolliton's inner halo. Manufacturing still goes on in a lot of these shops from the 1920s, 30s and 40s onward, though a lot of these businesses are more in the nature of industrial services now. There's still enough periodic noise that folks in the nearby row houses may grumble and kvetch. A unique part of the boroughs bordering the CBD: New Achansk City, part of the southern Victoriaville borough. This unique neighbourhood was built up heavily in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when numerous Amur Cossacks moved to the city. The area was a cluster of Russophone culture for a long time, the Orthodox church and distinctly Russian architectural styles reflecting the prevailing culture. These days you won't find as many Russians here; the area is a popular and hip multicultural district. The entire neighbourhood is protected by the city as the New Achansk City Heritage District, where no demolition may take place save in extenuating circumstances - adaptive reuse of the old Cossack heritage buildings is all but mandatory. Victoriaville is one of the more bustling and prosperous boroughs, wedged between the Amur River waterfront to the west, Gates Park to the northeast, downtown to the north and lower-density neighbourhoods to the south. While you'll find buildings from the interwar and post-war period here, modern designs are beginning to prevail. Bolliton grew up as a rail city, and old-style rail remains a key mode of transit here. Much of the rail infrastructure in the city's interior and inner halo has been elevated onto high viaducts with brownstone arcades arrayed beneath. The lines have been upgraded over the decades, and while not quite as flexible as light rail, they still move enormous numbers of people daily. This section of line runs north from Victoriaville along the edge of Gates Park to downtown, here being traversed by a Bolliton Transit Authority passenger train - the famous BTA People Mover. If you look to the left, you can spot a BTA bus passing through a busy intersection, part of the city transit network's extensive fleet of Orions. As you move further out from the central business district, density decreases. This BTA People Mover is heading southbound, with the very edge of Gates Park on the west side and the lower-density borough of Woodridge on the east. Woodridge in general marks an area of transition from dense inner-city midtowns towards lower-density neighbourhoods. This particular spur of the rail will hook west and continue on towards the boroughs of Sagdjina and Urbanovsky, then west to the suburbs. -
The city of Bolliton grew up on the shore of the Amur River. It sits at the head of a series of anabranches in the river, flowing in from the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers westward from the city proper. The river continues on north-northeast to flow into the Pacific, hundreds of kilometres downstream. While the largest port city in Beringia is no longer on the river - it's southward, on Golden Horn Bay - the river is still a vital waterway and a gateway to some of the best growing land in the country. The Port of Bolliton lies just north of the downtown, where the river widens to fork into the surrounding anabranches. At one point, this area was a major transfer station for grain and rice to be shipped out of Beringia. These days the port is a major industrial export site, with a number of major employers sited in the port lands. The borough of New Amurside has grown up overlooking it. The borough is "New Amurside" because of the Amurside Disaster of 1922. The borough and port were devastated that year when a tanker full of agricultural fertilizer detonated, leveling much of the region. The port was rebuilt rapidly, but the Disaster is memorialized in the city's history, nowhere more explicitly than here at the 1922 Memorial Plaza. In game terms, the city tile corrupted and had to be rebuilt from scratch. Whoops. Today, Nepac Steel is probably the largest industrial employer in the Port of Bolliton. Complaints about pollution are predictably rampant. Not all is work. Closer to downtown, Boli Beach remains a stretch of waterfront not surrendered to shorewall-type development. It's one of a couple of urban beaches open to anyone. To the south, the beach is overlooked by the PNEBank Centre, a major arena that is home to the Bolliton Tigers of the Pacific Hockey League and the Bolliton Rivermen of the Beringia Basketball Association. Northbound is the portal to one of two tunnels under the Amur, connecting to recently-developed boroughs built on sedimentary islands in the middle of the Amur. The tunnel comes out here. Building bridges was considered, but the city balked at wielding eminent domain against the amount of land that'd be needed for ramps to get the bridges high enough for freighters to pass beneath. While the largest ships stop north from here, at the seaport, others continue downriver a ways. A more recent addition to the waterfront: The Bolliton Star ferris wheel. It's a great ride if what you like is a beautiful view of the waterfront and the city skyline.
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Downtown Bolliton's planning in the early days fell on the shoulders of British-educated elites and Russian and Ukrainian expatriates fleeing rule from Moscow and Vienna. This has begun to change as Beringia has grown more cosmopolitan and comfortable with its local roots. The region was once part of the Manchurian sphere, and in the modern age, Manchu architects are leaving their mark on the cityscape. PNE Place is the tallest building in not just Bolliton, but Beringia. Commissioned by Pacific Northeast Bank (PNEBank) and designed by a Manchu architect, it was completed around 2010 and ranks among the top ten to fifteen tallest buildings on Earth. PNEBank is of course the main tenant, among numerous other corporations. Bolliton Central Station was constructed in the 1920s and remains the busiest stop on the Trans Beringia Railroad. Commercial development has concentrated around it, with older buildings from the early 1900s coexisting with newer ones. The tower to the right of the station (as pictured) is one of the largest employers in town. Development demand has steadily encroached on the Amur River waterfront, where old riprap seawalls have been replaced over the years by modern concrete esplanades. The oldest structure on the waterfront is a Russian Orthodox church, the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas, dating from the early 1900s and built with inspiration from a similar church in Moscow. The lands around it have been encroached on by modern glass towers and by the campus of the Amur Technical Institute, a modern technical-studies university. Administratively, Bolliton is divided into boroughs, each one electing a representative to Bolliton city council. The Gates Park borough grew up in the 1920s and 30s on the edge of downtown, transitioning from higher-density developments to classic brownstones and rowhouses. The borough's most notable landmark is likely PacLife Field, formerly known as Wally Buck Field in honour of a past mayor. Naming rights were sold off to PacLife, a major insurance company, in the 2000s as part of a scheme to circumvent budget shortfalls. The stadium remains home to the Bolliton Red Jackets baseball team.
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Beringia's capital has stood since the 1880s at the city of Bolliton. The city, home to in the ballpark of five-ish million people (on top of a more populous metro area), grew over the years from a railway hub and shipment centre for agricultural goods to become the most important city in the nation. Downtown Bolliiton grew up as a city of brick and stone masonry and concrete, sitting astride the Amur River near where the waterway forks around Big Ussuri Island - land that might be known as Khabarovsk in another time. These days, the city has begun to grow up. Her skyline is dominated now by glass towers more akin to those you'd see in places like Tokyo or Hong Kong. The downtown core by night. Downtown grew up around the Cathedral of St. Alban the Martyr, the largest Anglican church in Bolliton. While developers have occasionally lobbied to grow in closer to the old 1890s building, city councils have resolved over the years to protect the church grounds, leaving it as an island of heritage church architecture among the girders, lights and concrete of downtown. The church itself is more heritage site than anything else these days, given the growing prevalence of Orthodox Christianity and Buddhism and the relative decline of Protestant denominations as the country grows more diverse. Beringia is governed by a bicameral Parliament, which meets on the southern edge of downtown at Parliament Centre. The neighbouring cube is home to the Supreme Court of Beringia.
