Dr Caroline EdwardsBirkbeck, University of London

caroline.edwards@bbk.ac.uk

Dark City: London After the Apocalypse

London’s apocalyptic tradition

The angel of death presides over London during the Great Plague of 1665–66

apocalypse (n.) 14thc., “revelation, disclosure,” from Church Latin apocalypsis

Derives from Ancient Greek: ἀποκάλυψις [apokálypsis], meaning a lifting of the veil or revelation.

But the use of apocalypse to mean “a cataclysmic event” is modern.

John Martin, The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822)

Richard Jefferies, After London, or, Wild England (1885)

Caspar David Friedrich, Klosterruine Eldena (c.1825)

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)

Henrique Alvim Corrêa, “Falling Star” from the 1906 Belgian special illustrated edition of The War of the

Worlds

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher

than many houses, striding over the young

pine-trees, and smashing them aside in its career;

a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel

dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder.

(p. 46) Horsell Common, Surrey

The Exodus from London

“I thought of the multitudinous hopes and efforts, the

innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this human

reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had

hung over it all” (p. 170).

This “city of dreadful night”

Yuko Shimizu’s cover for the 2012 edition of M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901)

Looking directly south … I could recline at ease in the red-velvet easy-chair, and see. […] Soon after midnight there was a sudden and very visible increase in the conflagration. On all hands I began to see blazing structures soar, with grand hurrahs, on high. In fives and tens, in twenties and thirties, all between me and the remote limit of my vision, they leapt, they lingered long, they fell. My spirit more and more felt, and danced – deeper mysteries of sensation, sweeter thrills. I sipped exquisitely, I drew out enjoyment leisurely.

(M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud [1901], p. 141)

Modernist London & Apocalypse

John L. Stoddard, “Busy traffic on London Bridge” (c.1900)

But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within;

greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a

hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of

the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which

will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when

London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the

pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few

wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of

innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be

known.” (Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway [1925])

The collapsing world of the cosy catastrophe

[London] still contrived to give the impression that a touch of a magic wand

would bring it to life again, though many of the vehicles in the streets were beginning to turn rusty. A year later the change was more noticeable. Large patches of plaster detached from housefronts had begun to litter the pavements. Dislodged tiles and

chimney-pots could be found in the streets. (p. 197)Once – not that year, nor the next, but later

on – I stood in Piccadilly Circus again, looking round at the desolation, and trying

to recreate in my mind’s eye the crowds that once swarmed there. I could no longer

do it. Even in my memory they lacked reality. There was no tincture of them now. They had become as much a backcloth

of history as the audiences in the Roman Colosseum or the army of the

Assyrians, and somehow, just as far removed. (p. 198)

After London: island havens and four-gated cities

London after ecocatastrophe

Dick French, illustration for J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World [1962] 1981 Dragon’s Dream edition

“The reptiles had taken over the city…”

Illustration by James Boswell for the 2013 Folio Society edition of J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World [1962]

Looming just bellow the dark pellucid surface were the dim rectangular outlines of the submerged buildings, their open windows like empty eyes in enormous drowned skulls. Only a few feet from the surface, they drew closer, emerging from the depths like an immense intact Atlantis.

[…] “Robert! Stop it! It’s horrible!” Kerans felt Beatrice seize his arm, her long blue nails biting through the fabric of his dinner jacket. She gazed out at the emerging city, an expression of revulsion on her tense face, physically repelled by the sharp acrid smells of the exposed water-weeds and algae, the damp barnacled forms of rusting litter. Veils of scum draped from the criss-crossing telegraph wires and tilting neon signs, and a thin coating of silt cloaked the faces of the buildings, turning the once limpid beauty of the underwater city into a drained and festering sewer.

(J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World [1962], pp. 120-1)Fan art, artist

unknown

Anna Podedworna, “Moth” (2009), inspired by China Miéville's Perdido Street Station

(2000)

Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London (2011)

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (1996)

Maggie Gee, The Flood (2004)

Apocalyptic London in contemporary literature

Reviving Guy Fawkes for the Thatcher Era

From Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta (1988-9)

London’s overthrow?

Graffiti attributed to Bansky

THIS IS AN era of CGI end-times porn, but London’s destructions, dreamed-up and real,

started a long time ago. It’s been drowned, ruined by war, overgrown, burned up, split in

two, filled with hungry dead. Endlessly emptied.

(China Miéville, London’s Overthrow [2012], p. 10)