At the confluence of the River Pitch and the River Crease, at the highest navigation point of the latter, and marking the site where the eight provinces of Dynamo meet, Hubcaster is the country’s central city. Its industries (milling, brewing, agricultural and railway engineering, wool and linen) also make it the second largest manufacturing town. Until the eighteenth century the country’s capital city and centre of the profitable wool-trade, Hubcaster has long been an important cultural centre with the finest medieval town centre in the country.

The city’s situation where the limestone plateaux of the west pass underneath a stratum of chalk, mean that flint (associated with calcareous deposits) was always plentiful, leading both to the surrounding area’s importance in Stone-Age times and also, from the Middle Ages, assuring a plentiful supply of flint for building. Hubcaster’s cityscape is therefore a maze of brick-and-flint buildings, from the old Guild Hall, to the Mansion House and the former Parliament building, now the regional assembly house of the province of Arcadia. The confluence of the rivers, together with the importance of river transport (for grain, wool, timber and other building materials), together with many local interconnecting creeks and cannels, mean that the city seems like one built on water, with many of the old red-brick mills and warehouses backing onto the waterways that supplied them with raw materials.

The famous Hubcaster School of Painting, with its masters such as John Chrome and John Spell provides a picturesque record of the cityscape of the late 18^th– and early 19^th-century golden age, with their paintings of the city gates, the timber-yards and warehouses, the old sun-warmed brick walls of the mill-yards, whose bases are lapped by the waters of the Pitch or the Crease and where working men, breeches and shirt-sleeves rolled, fished or waded in the warm shallows. The historic market place, framed by the Guild Hall, the Mansion House, the old Parliament Building and St Peter’s church, has for centuries provided the focus of the city’s trade and commerce, offering for sale produce and manufactures from the eight province of Dynamo. The 12^th-century Cathedral, with its tall and graceful spire, is the landmark of the lower reaches of the city, its elegant Close surrounded by the willows and water-meadows that characterise the Crease from this point downstream, a landscape also lovingly explored by painters of the Hubcaster School.