A New Oriental Ism - The Anglo-Gothic Imagination in the East London

8/3/2019 A New Oriental Ism - The Anglo-Gothic Imagination in the East London

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A new orientalism?

The Anglo-Gothic imagination in East London by Phil Cohen

Some reflections on the Gothic Revival in East End Literature

Introduction: an everyday story of the Barbaresque

At the beginning of 1995, the London Evening Standard ran a series of special reports on the

condition of East London, under the title ‘The Betrayed’. The declared aim was to ‘reveal how so

many of its citizens live an underprivileged existence in the shadow of the success of this great

capital’. The series rehearsed many of the key themes of a journalistic campaign run over a

century earlier by WT Snead in the Pall Mall Gazette—in a series of articles on juvenile crime,

female prostitution and urban decay under the title ‘the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’

which did much to set the terms of public debate and intervention into the life of the East End

from the 1880s until the First World War and beyond.

The Standard report examined what it called ‘the blood-stained face of race relations in East

London, exacerbated by poverty and disease’. The front page showed a picture of white youth,

under the caption: ‘Cannon Street Whitechapel and the random victim of an Asian gang stumble

to safety, his head pouring with blood. ‘

This picture is used to introduce and in a sense anchor the main theme of the report, which is that

Bangladeshi gangs are on the rampage, picking on innocent white people in a form of reverse

racism, committing gratuitous acts of revenge for the harassment they have suffered over the

years at the hands of white East Enders. This message is underlined on the inside cover, where

there is a photograph of a group of Bangladeshi boys lined up across a street, in a gangsta-style

‘they shall not pass’ pose.

Of course, this graphic realism is no less constructed than the meaning of the picture itself. But

what seems so peculiar about the text that is supposed to authenticate it, is that it is couched in

such florid sensationalist terms, as if it were a piece of popular fiction, rather than a

demonstration of sociological fact.

The introductory paragraph gives the flavour, and is worth quoting in full:

By the time we reached the street there was blood everywhere. The muffled crash we heard while

we were talking in the Golden Lion Social Club must have been the bottle breaking on his head.

Under the streetlights, the bloodied glass was being ground into the pavement by the boots that came again and again, pounding at the stranger’s body. They were about 20 of them a nd they all

ran off together, melting into the night. Their victim looked like he had blundered out of a

Tarantino movie. He was spitting out the blood trickling into his mouth. His companion, although

unharmed, was clearly in shock. We were just walking back from the pub. It sounded like a pathetic

bleat of protest. Why us? Such a question on a dark night in Cannon Street Whitechapel can only

be rhetorical. He knew why and so did we. His friend, gathering his wits, dabbed at the blood in his

eyes. He was i n no doubt. It’s because we’re white, mate.

We are back in the torrid world of Victorian melodrama and slum fiction, now remade into a

Tarantino movie. As readers we are deliberately turned into the spectators of a piece of cinema or

street theatre, which has been staged for our benefit. The dramatic quality of the mise en scene isenhanced by not revealing the colour of victim and assailant until the last sentence. The holding



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back of the key racial descriptor (‘it’s because we’re white, mate’) and its sudden revelation

functions as a kind of denouement, a shock tactic designed to encapsulate the main point of the

argument:

Attacks, assaults, hatred —there is a mood of gothic barbarity amongst the poor and the angry

encapsulated in this warning by the 21-year-old posse leader in the Golden Lion Social Club. ‘We

are the majority, we are strong. If anyone gives us trouble we will hurt them.’ Yes, that much isknown. We have the picture that proves it.

The reference to the gothic has a double meaning in this context. It certainly evokes a return to a

new dark ages brought about by the advent of an alien, uncivilized anti-Christian power in our

midst. Islamaphobia rules OK!

This, too, is a well-rehearsed theme. The Victorian urban explorers frequently used racial imagery

to define the ‘natives’ of the East End as primitives; with the settlement of colonies of Chinese,

Malays, and Africans in Docklands areas, and then the advent of Jewish immigrants from Eastern

Europe, the non-Christian, non-occidental character of the area became a topic of increasing

public concern. Just as the West End was sharpening its image as the cosmopolitan hub of a

worldwide Empire, so it was felt to be increasingly menaced by the East End as a kind of Internal

Orient, a dark mysterious continent whose dense localisms formed the heart of That Other

England, where the Empire was already preparing to strike back.

Its first cartographer was Thomas De Quincey. In The Confessions of an English Opium Eater he

discusses his experiences with the ‘oriental drug’ and his explorations as an East End flaneur in

almost identical terms. His dreams are crowded with turbulent processions of Chinese and Malays,

in street bazaars where he is forever lost and wandering in search of forbidden pleasures, pursued

by the monstrous fauna and flora of the Ganges and the Nile. Then he describes himself walking in

an East End ‘surrounded on all sides with a sea of myriad shapes in which everything fluctuates as I

seek to find an individual human face ‘within the indistinguishable mass of this surplus population

so reminiscent of the swarming continent of Asia’.



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De Quincey also observes in the language and gestures of this East Enders ‘the subtle signs of

subversion, the Jacobin influence’. He is both fascinated by the promiscuity of the urban crowd

and fears its powers of social contagion and combination, and he locates both in an imaginary

geography where the East represents what he calls the barbaresque: the negation of everything

that the West stands for.

As John Barrell shows in his important study, De Quincey’s fear of being ‘contaminated’ byphysical or social contact was also an important theme in his anti-Semitism. In one notorious

passage he writes of ‘men’s natural abhorrence of the Jewish taint, as once in Jerusalem they had

hated the leprosy and cholera (oriental diseases), because even while they raved against it the

secret proofs of it could be detected amongst their own kindred’.

In the portrayal of the East End as a centre of foreign immigration, anti-Semitism and orientalism

increasingly converged in constructing an alien threat which is both global in scope and intensely

local in effect. In the process, Jews are increasingly confused with ‘Orientals’. For example one of

the witnesses from a local community settlement cross-examined during the police enquiry into

the Jack the Ripper murders described living conditions in the Jewish quarters in the following

terms:

There is something of the Oriental bazaar about the Jewish market, the swarms of unkempt

children running hither and thither on countless errands, the women haggling with each other,

shouting to make themselves heard over the general hubbub, the men scurrying in and out of dark

alleyways, the whole effect is one of labyrinthine confusion which can scarcely fail to make a

fearful impression on the casual visitor.

In the sober deliberations from the House of Commons Select Committee on Housing in 1901 we

find the following exchange:

Lord Robert Cecil: What do you say about the inhabitants?

Lord Lupton: Most of the inhabitants are Jews and their habits are said to be clean so far as their

persons go, but certainly the courts outside their houses are…

Lord Robert Cecil: Eastern in character.

Lord Lupton: Yes that is so exactly.

The Jews referred to were of course Ashkenazes from the shetls of Eastern Europe, not Sephardis

from North Africa or the Middle East, but this conflation is entirely characteristic of both popular

and official perceptions of the period. At the same time, moral panics around drugs and sexuality

that focused on the Chinese community of Limehouse in the late Victorian and Edwardian period

included many features borrowed from anti-Semitism. As Marek Kohn has shown, the theme of a

criminal underworld organized by a secret oriental conspiracy, which was popularized by Sax

Rohmer in his Fu Manchu novels, owed much of its logic to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Another point of convergence was the white slave trade. If opium was a medium of seduction of

white women by ‘men of colour’, their induction into oriental perversity was supposed to lead

inexorably to their final fall into the hands of Jewish pimps who shipped them out to the brothels

of the Middle East. Finally, the Asian and Jewish communities were accused of a common

duplicity; the outward appearance of respectability and even prosperity was only a cloak for

hidden cruelty or corruption undermining both family and nation. Jewish money allied to Oriental

vice was a channel linking East End with West End, directly injecting moral infection into the

civilized heart of the metropolis.



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This close articulation of Orientalism and Anti-Semitism has been an important element in both

literary and journalistic representations of the East End over the past century. But it is important

to stress that the idea of the East End as an internal orient was not confined in its application to

Jews. The Irish and English working class were also recruited—cockney urchins, for example, were

routinely redescribed as street Arabs.

What this form of Orientalism drew upon and radicalized was a certain more general way of thinking and feeling about the city, and in particular its ‘spectral geographies’, its ‘other scenes’ in

which the gothic has played a central role. This tradition has been powerfully renewed in much

recent writing and painting which takes London’s post-industrial development to the east of the

City as its subject. In the second part of this study I will be looking at this body of work in some

detail, in order to analyse its relation to the cultural turn in regeneration. In this first part of the

study I want to trace and situate its provenance in a broader historical perspective.

Bare ruined choirs

‘High Towers, faire temples, goodly theatres

strong walls, rich porches, princely palaces

large streets, brave houses, sacred sepulchres

All those ( o pitie) now are turned to dust

and overgrown by black oblivion’s dirt.‘

Edmund Spenser, The Ruins of Time

‘It is often our mightiest projects that betray the degree of our insecurity. We gaze at them in

wonder —a kind of wonder which is itself a form of dawning horror, for we know somehow by

instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them and are

designated from the first with an eye t o their later existence as ruins.‘

WG Sebald, Austerlitz

In an essay on the peculiarities of English modernism, Eric Hobsbawm has argued that its roots

were paradoxically gothic: ‘In the smoky workshop of the world, a society of egoism and aesthetic

vandals, where the small craftsman so visible elsewhere in Europe could no longer be seen in the

fog generated by the factories, the medievalism of peasants and artisans had long seemed a

model of a society both socially and artistically more satisfactory.‘

The argument skilfully points up the possible continuities, as well as the tension between the anti-

industrial, anti-urban bias of many English socialists and social reformers, such as John Ruskin and

Ebenezer Howard, and the aristocratic taste for the gothic and its revival in late Victorian literature

and the arts. If the Gothic imagination provided a privileged medium for the English encounter

with modernism, it was because it provided both a language and a landscape in which the ghostsin the machinery of industrial capitalism—the hidden hands who kept its engines of growth in

motion—could first be called up and then, if not laid to rest, at least usefully employed in the

historical task of accomplishing its downfall and final ruin.

The typical mise en scene of the gothic novel features half-destroyed structures, often ancient, or

mediaeval (and more recently modern) buildings which have either fallen into decay or disrepair,

or been subject to attack, through vandalism or bombardment. These buildings contain secret

chambers, subterranean passages, trapdoors, underground vaults, putrefying corpses, all of which

have an important narrative function in evoking a past that has been forgotten or ignored, rather

than cultivated or celebrated as a living heritage and which returns as a threatening or disruptive



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force. The gothic thus represents what has been repressed or made unrepresentable by modernity

but which returns to haunt it.

According to this line of thinking, if capitalism established itself as the great civilization of

modernity by destroying the modes of production that preceded it, it was only to give birth to a

force that would one day just as violently supersede it; the mission of the Anglo-Gothic

imagination was to give this process a local habitation and a name: William Blake called it Los;those who followed in his footsteps spoke of Babylon: an outcast London whose grandest

architectures remain overshadowed by sepulchral ruins, and whose brightest thoroughfares are

haunted by an afflicted populace, bodies and minds ravaged by what capital had made of them.

Blake sets the scene:

I wandered through each chartered street

Near where the chartered Thames does flow

And marked in every face I meet

marks of weakness, marks of woe

I also stood in Satans bosom and beheld its desolations:

A ruined man, a ruin’d building of God, not made with hands

Its mountains of marble terrible

Its pits and declivities flowing with molten ore and fountains

Of pitch and nitre; its ruin’d palaces &d cities & mighty works

Its furnaces of affliction in which his Angels and Emanations

Labour with blackened visages among its stupendous ruins

Arches, & pyramids and porches, colonnades and domes,

In which dwells Mystery, Babylon

Those who followed in his footsteps as explorers of ‘London Babylon’ were not always as anxious

as Blake to resist the assimilation of ruin sentiment to the picturesque. His apocalyptic vision of

history, in which the dreadful has already happened, his evocations of the Uncanny, that twilight

world in which the living and the dead, the animate and inanimate, become strangely confused,

has, however provided a major resource for writers and painters attracted to what might be called

the metropolitan sublime. They have given us a city whose traffic with the world follows

mysterious lines of desire not to be found on any planners’ map: itineraries and encounters with

London’s ‘other scene’, which the long march of municipal improvement has tried in vain to sweep

from the streets. Anywhere the urban underclass and the bohemian demi-monde mingle and

trade, under whatever name—the slum, the rookery, the red light district, the immigrant quarter,

the zone of transition—generates its own hidden economy whose highly social but nevertheless

largely immaterial forms of productivity point to the limits of the fully rationalized city. It is in and

through these sites, at any rate, that the Anglo-Gothic imagination has made itself fully at home in

the idioms of metropolitan modernity.

Moreover, if the dynamism of the modern city, driven by the ‘monstrous’ productivity of capital

was to be its own downfall, then at least its proletarian gravediggers had to be trained up as future

keepers of the ruins. This was the ‘pedagogic’ task which the artists and poets of the Romantic

Movement assigned to themselves, and which marked out their ambivalent identification, as a

self-conscious Bohemian intelligentsia, with the liberation struggles of the oppressed urban

masses.



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Rejecting the picturesque rural scene in favour of the sublime terrors of the metropolitan abyss, it

was not difficult for a Poe, a Baudelaire, or an ETA Hoffman, even, nearer home, for a James

Thompson or Arthur Machen, to discover the labyrinth, the secret passage, the dungeon, and all

the other characteristic devices of the gothic mise en scene in the ‘wastelands’ of the working-

class city with its maze of courtyards and alleyways, its cellars and dead ends. In their hands the

eighteenth-century gothic ruin with its ‘tottring battlements dressed with rampant ivy’s

unchecked growth’ is relocated in the dilapidated tenements and ‘dark Satanic mills’ where the‘dangerous, perishing and labouring classes’ were confined. In urbanizing and modernizing the

ruin, their aim was purely cartographic; as good Bohemians they wanted to map the territory, to

conserve its danger and its difference, not to reform or translate it into some approximation of the

‘bourgeois thing’.

James Thompson in The City of Dreadful Night (1874) made the link between the ancient and the

modern in these terms:

The city is ruinous, although

Great ruins of an unremembered past

With others of a few short years agoMore sad and found within its precincts vast.

This promiscuous intermingling of ruins created a spectral geography in which distinctions of

wealth and poverty were magically erased. These connoisseurs of urban dereliction were too

invested in ‘ruin sentiment’ and what might still be excavated imaginatively from it—the evidence

of a long and continuous national history, in which ruptures and breaks, even the devastations of

war, could be recuperated as part of an organic (albeit entirely invented) tradition—to want to see

the slums of the Victorian city demolished altogether.

Their plan view of London Babylon thus had little concern with such mundane matters as street

lighting, sanitation and new model dwellings, let alone the Clean Air Act. Such improvements

would only have the effect of destroying the city as an aesthetic resource. The capital city

envisioned by the Fabians and other municipal reformers who were to found the London County

Council was neither mysterious, awesome, terrifying or sublime; their modest programme of

public works and parks, their hygienic vision of Suburbia, was as useless for entertaining the

prospect of revolution as for contemplating the retrospect of civilizational decay and decline. But

it was the Bourgeois Fabians not the Bohemian Conservationists who won the day.

In the 1860s and 70s more of London was rebuilt that at any time since the Great Fire of 1666. As

Lynda Nead has shown, large parts of the central and inner city were turned into a vast building

site, as the Metropolitan board of works and the railway companies undertook the widening and

straightening of roads, creating new thoroughfares levelling and tunnelling wherever they went. In



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a novel of the period that saw the upheaval of modernization in frankly apocalyptic terms, the

hero remarks:

I was astounded in coming again into the busy city to observe great changes wrought in its

appearance. Some of the bridges over the river that I had left intact were nearly demolished and

others were springing up supplant them. Market place hotel and houses were in ruins or had put

on a new aspect. Arches had risen over many thoroughfares and trains swept above and betweenhouses to the jeopardy of upper tenements and tenants. What with the digging and pulling down,

building and improving I could scarcely recognize the old streets

But these improvements were unevenly distributed. The main effect was to clear large areas of

Holborn and Westminster of its residual rookeries and drive ‘outcast London’ eastwards. The Mile

End Road and the Peoples Palace also exemplified the new municipalism, but as for the rest,

London became an increasingly visible tale of two cities: The West End as the glittering home to

the conspicuous consumption of a new leisure class; and the East End, where home-grown

workshop industries joined hands with international trade and commerce to support a large,

almost exclusively working-class population and a hidden economy which provided a major

additional resource for the area’s diverse immigrant communities.

There were two responses to this new spatial alignment of leisure and labour, wealth and poverty.

The first, focused on East London itself, we have already briefly characterized as a form of internal

Orientalism, drawing on the tropes, and characterology of popular gothic literature to construct

the area as wholly Other, and its denizens as members of a ‘race apart’. WT Snead in the The

Maiden Tribute) already referred to, drew on the imagery of the Book of Revelation, with its vision

of the apocalyptic destruction of cities, to explore ‘that strange inverted world that is the London

labyrinth’ and portrays the dreadful consequences of allowing a great part of the capital to

become ‘a den of iniquity’.

Although Mayhew and Booth eschewed such overt religious imagery, their accounts of East

London’s life and labour, for all their claims to ethnographic authenticity or scientific objectivity

were not averse to taking a leaf or two out of Dickens’ books (especially Oliver Twist and Dombey

and Son) to graft some kind of realism onto material that all too readily lent itself to the

sensational emplotments of the gothic novel.

Through these various narrative devices the East End was sealed off as a site of urban dereliction:

either rendered into a mysterious underworld entirely enclosed within its own densely

impenetrable meanings, or else shown as a capillary power structure surreptitiously infiltrating the

‘over world’ through the traffic in dangerous drugs, sex, and ideas.

The docks and their immediate hinterlands became central to this new iconography because they

could be made to represent both versions of the story: an intensely local, almost closed

community which nevertheless controlled a key artery of international trade; a potent force in the

organized labour movement and the new unionism but an equally significant presence in the East

End’s hidden economy.

Little wonder that the Dockers themselves played such an important role in what the East End was

made to represent about the state of the nation as a whole: at once the backbone of the nation

and a race apart, patriotic cockneys and congenital crooks, heroic boxers and athletes, as well as

sexual rough trade; the figure of the docker in its very duplicity came to focus all the ambivalent

identifications which both bourgeois and bohemian entertained towards the East End and its

diversely dangerous classes.



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The second response to the modernizing process was to focus on the West End and the City and

apply the devices of romantic ruinology to the task of deconstructing its pretensions of power as

exemplified in its great public buildings.

Hubert Robert had first popularized the genre by imagining the Louvre in ruins—sacked by a

victorious proletariat, a visual polemic made by a disgruntled aristocrat shortly after the fall of the

Bastille. In similar fashion Joseph Gandy depicted the newly built Bank of England as a classical

Piranesi ruin and the Compte de Volney in his classic account of Revolution and Empire producednumerous imaginary pictures of the great cities of the world in ruins to illustrate his pessimistic

thesis about the rise and fall of civilizations, in an argument which bears closely on Marx’s

observations about ‘the mutual ruin of the contending classes’.



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In 1872 the French engraver Gustave Dore teamed up with travel writer Blanchard Jerrold to

produce London: A Pilgrimage, a guided tour of the city based on a geography of contrasts

between high society and lowlife, West End and East. Dore had a profound fascination with the

grotesque; he illustrated Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Poe’s short stories, Dante’s Divine Comedy. In what

was ostensibly a travel book, he uses his skill with chiaroscuro effects to depict the tale of two

cities—one of glittering light and the other of murky depths, associated here not so much withcapital and labour as with the worlds of the rentier and the criminal. His pictures of slum housing

have been endlessly reproduced and, for example, provided the visual inspiration for the Crown

Film Unit’s classic inter-war documentary on the subject, which in turn had an important influence

of post war urban planning. But for all that he was not after documentary realism, but its gothic

equivalent.

We can see this is an etching captioned ‘a New Zealander contemplating the ruins of a once great

and powerful city’. It shows an artist seated on a broken arch of London Bridge sketching a

cathedral like ruin. On closer inspection this building turns out not to be a church but the brand

new Cannon Street Station (completed in 1873) here imagined with the cast iron piers of the



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bridge rusting away in the tidal ooze. The railway whose coming had done so much to transform

London into a modern metropolis is thus rendered into a piece of obsolete industrial archaeology.

This conceit gives a new twist to an old tale. The figure of the native from the new world

contemplating the ruins of London was already well established by the time Dore came to depict

his version of the scene. It was mentioned by Gibbon in his study of the Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire and also in a throwaway comment by Macauley. In Archimago, a gothic ruin novelpublished in 1864, the scene is vividly described:

I sit upon the last crumbling stones of that bridge, erst the famous London Bridge Pavement,

footway, parapet abutment pillar, pier all are gone… and I on the last few mouldering stones

survey the ruin’d and desolate city.

Subsequently, Dore’s picture, with its theme of the artist triumphantly surveying (and surviving)

the destruction of modern technology has been taken up by Michael Moorcock, one of the key

figures in the contemporary renaissance of urban ruin fiction. In ‘Mother London’ and in a series of

science fiction stories written from the vantage point of the late twenty-first century Moorcock

has been concerned to construct an archaeology of the present in the form of a counterfactual

history in which ‘modernity’ is just a blip on the screen. And true to Hobsbawm’s formula, he

imagines the future as a regression to a mediaeval world of villages and primitive agriculture:

We reached the ancient village of Suthuk which is on the edge of the river bed of the Thames, most

of which is reclaimed land planted with cabbages, the export of which form the principle staple of

the country.

Our first destination was the vestiges of the once famous Lun-dun Bridge mentioned in many

ancient accounts and in one folk lore ballad which has come down to us beginning ‘Lun-Dun bridge

is falling down’ Several arches of this structure now span the intervening space between the village

of Suthuk and the extremely picturesque ruins which are visible on the summit of an opposite

eminence.

These ruins are all that is left of the once famous Cockni cathedral of St Pauls. Several benighted

peasants we are told claim to be the last survivors of the tribe of the Cocknies now began to gather

round us and to offer for barter certain objects they had dug up-many of which possessed a certain

archaeological interest.

Altogether the impression made on us was one of admiration mingled with awe and wonder at

these monuments of a past civilization. No doubt it seemed to the inhabitants of ancient Angleland

and their mighty city of Lun-dun that they would escape the fate that had overtaken Assyria, Egypt

Greece and Rome, that the solidity of their structures would escape the tooth of time, But although

they have thus passed away and left nothing but these relics to attest to their former glory yet theEnglish people played their part in the hastening the ultimate civilisation of the world and its

adjacent planets which we today witness.

Indeed there are few places which promise a great attract for a summer holiday that the ruins of

ancient Lun-dun.

All that is solid melts into fog and marsh

‘I watched the sun

On lurid morns on monstrous afternoons

Push out through fog with his dilated disk

And startle the slant roofs and chimney potsWith splashes of fierce colour. or I saw



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Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog

Involve the passive city, strangle it

Alive, and draw it into the void

Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge

Had wiped out London—or as noon and night

Had clapped together and utterly struck out

The intermediate time, undoing themselves

In the act.. Your city poets see such things.

But sit in London at the days decline

And view the city perish in the mist

Like Pharaoh’s armaments in the deep red sea

Then surprised

By a sudden sense of vision and of tune

You feel as conquerors though you did not fight…’

Elisabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 1857

‘Picture a land of mist and mud… London as an immense, sprawling rain drenched metropolis

stinking of soot and hot iron and wrapped in a perpetual mantle of smoke and fog… ceaseless

activity in warehouses and on wharves washed by the dark slimy waters of an imaginary Thames in

the midst of the forest of masts, a tangle of beams and girders piercing the pale lowering clouds.

Up above trains raced by at full speed and down in the underground sewers others rumbled along

occasionally emitting ghastly screams or vomiting floods of smoke through the gaping mouths of

airshafts’

Huysmans A Rebours (1884)

‘Unreal city

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many

I had not thought death had undone so many.‘

TS Eliot, The Wasteland

At night, while he was working on the ‘London Pilgrimage’, Dore, accompanied by a minder,

wandered the streets of Limehouse and Cable street with sketch pad in hand, part flaneur , part

slummer, part artist in residence. But his days were spent at the Café Royal, mixing in what was

then known as the ‘haute boheme‘ Oscar Wilde was a member of the circle and so too was James

McNeill Whistler and Claude Monet while they were in town to paint the Thames red, yellow,

vermillion and green. Both artists has been attracted to London by a phenomenon which served toblur the outlines of its distinctive and divided social geography—it famous fogs.

The smoke was Victorian and Edwardian London’s second name. ‘Peasoupers’ turned day into

night, rendered the most modern parts of the metropolis once more mysterious, and terrifying;

under the brown fog of a winter dawn even the most brightly lit and open thoroughfares suddenly

became spectral and unreal places, traffic ground to a halt, and thousands of Londoners, especially

the very young and the old, suffered and died prematurely of respiratory illness.



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The Thames was the prime attractor of fogs, whose cause, of course, lay principally elsewhere, in

the large scale domestic and industrial burning of coal throughout the city. But this association

between metropolitan miasma and an increasingly polluted river (the Thames was in effect an

open sewer carrying both industrial and human waste leading to the Great Stink of 1851)enhanced the scandal that was Babylon; Ruskin in ‘Storm, cloud of the 19th century’ portrayed fog

as a physical sign not just of industrialism but of its morally polluting effect on the human

condition while Huysmans elaborated a whole cartography of special landscape effects predicated

on the spectral gloom.

If Dore was concerned to depict the grotesque effect of London’s fogs on the lungs of its people,

Whistler and Monet were more interested in its aesthetic properties. Monet was intrigued by the

way fog transformed light and colour, and in his London river paintings he uses broken masses of

colour to create smudged surfaces and blurred outlines which give the canvas its layered painterly

texture and organize the composition. No wonder he was on record as saying that what he adored



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most about London was the fog, since in his eyes it made the city look ever more like one of his

own impressionist paintings: Nature imitating art imitating the environment.

In contrast, Whistler’s etchings of the Thames (the famous nocturne series) tried to made

dockland look not picturesque but sublime; using a range of diffused tints to envelop each scene,

he paints the river as if it were the further shore of some industrial Byzantium, so effectively

vaporising the squalor which Dore invested with such fine graphic detail.The indeterminacy of form, the uncanny reversals of figure and ground which fog gives to a

landscape, was for Whistler, as for many urban Romantic poets, an incitement to imagine another

world—the Isle of Dogs as the Isle of Doges. As Whistler put it in his diary:

And when the evening most clothes the riverside with poetry as with a veil and the poor buildings

lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanili and the warehouses were

palaces in the night and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairy land is before us.

Elisabeth Browning (see quote above) castigates the city poets for their moral passivity in the face

of urban degradation and the all too easy victories achieved by their aesthetic resolution of it into

a metropolitan sublime; but the kind of subtle alchemy wrought by dusk or the painterly palette,the cosmetic makeover achieved by fog, the consoling melancholy of ruins, these devices of

imaginative transformation offered a powerful symbolic substitute for the kinds of material

change associated with social and political struggle—struggles in which, I have argued, the

bohemian subculture inhabited by painters and writers had little real interest or stake.

The apocalyptic vision of the capital’s ruin had one further resource: its cemeteries. Cities of the

dead, abandoned cities where only the undead roam, generalised the topos of the gothic novel to

the modern urban condition. Eliot’s vision of office worker-zombies streaming across London

Bridge (‘so many, I had not thought death had undone so many’) feeds upon a vein of poetic

imagery that, as we have seen, has a long provenance. But in giving urban gothic a

characteristically modern twist, he points it in a direction whose more radical implications he istemperamentally, and ideologically, reluctant to pursue. For Necropolis is where the power of

living labour gives way to dead labour, and where the Holy Church of Capital gets finally to rule

OK.

London had always relied on a large reserve army of labour to service its economy, many of them

East End immigrants. But one effect of the rising organic composition of capital in the drive for

profit was to replace the combinatory powers of labour with new technologies as the key driver of

productivity and growth. The long, uneven (and never fully completed) transition from small

workshop production to the Fordist machine age meant that dead labour (the value of labour

power embodied in machines) rather than living labour (the trade skills of manual workers) was

now widely regarded as the animating force of London’s economic vitality.



14

In consequence a growing population of casual or intermittent workers, whose mobility was

governed by both seasonal and cyclical fluctuations in demand was added to the ranks of the

urban underclass, as were the hidden hands who serviced the new metropolitan consumer

culture. The ratio of ghosts in the machine—those whom dead labour had undone—to those who

continued to embody the meaning of work as the living creation of value, shifted decisively in

favour of zombiedom.

In the age of machinofacture, the bodily metaphors which had hitherto described—and

naturalised—the process of London’s de and re/generation were in any case bei ng made

increasingly redundant. In their place mechanistic metaphors of reproduction—of function and

dysfunction modelled the city’s spatial divisions of labour as the basis for organising them into

distinctive zones of regulation. Those places, populations and practices which fell through the

rationalising grid found themselves confined to a new form of urban liminality —a twilight zone in

the interstices of metropolitan modernity, where they morphed easily into figures of an existing

gothic landscape.

The vast cemeteries that were built to provide a last resting place for London’s growing population

were often built in the East, where land was cheap and, just as important unfitted for any otherpurpose. This necropolis was Victorian London’s edge city drawing around itself a whole nexus of

social, cultural and economic activity; in the twentieth century, as the city sprawled ever further

eastwards into the Essex marshlands turning them into the suburban bad lands of Chingford,

Romford, and Dagenham, the romantic ruinologists used the movement of both the living and the

dead to good effect to create a whole new space of representation for the urban uncanny.

Marshes had long been a part of the gothic vocabulary—the home of pestilential fogs, and solitary

rumination, belonging neither to land nor sea, but where these elements enter into their most

intimate dialogue. The vast muddy indistinction of sky, water and shore that is the Thames Estuarywas host to a endless speculations about the porousness or permeabi lity of the nation’s

boundaries—as well as to doubts about the loyalties and residential status of those who lived

there. Cockneys kids might be happy as mud larks playing on the holiday ‘beaches’ of Canvey, but

anyone quite so at home in the tidal ooze was at the very least an anthropological curiosity, and

not to be regarded as a fully-fledged member of the ‘island race’ unless otherwise specified.

For the ruinologist the very indeterminacy of the marshy habitat provided an ideal setting for the

telling of cautionary tales about the transience of human existence and/or the vanity of the

grandiose monuments to Industry and Empire which now dominated the capital’s skyline. In After

London, Richard Jeffries draws on one of the original uses of the gothic ruin, as a site for

contemplating the triumph of nature over the follies of man to paint a powerful picture of this



15

new Babylon, a megalopolis strangled by its own monstrously destructive forces of production and

reverting to the organic vegetative condition of marshland. Mud, slime and ooze become the

symptomatic medium of destruction, carrying the trace elements of the ruined civilisation to a

watery grave.

‘When the wind collects the miasma and as it were presses it together it becomes visible as a low

cloud which hangs over the place. They say the sun is sometimes hidden when the vapour isthickest —it is plain there are no fishes in the water all the rottenness of a thousand years is there

festering under the water.

Vast marshes now cover the site of ancient London; through there is no doubt that in the days of

old there flowed the River Thames. The river had become partially choked from the cloaca of the

ancient city which poured into it through enormous subterranean aqueducts and drains... When

this had been going on for some time the river unable to find a channel began to overflow into the

deserted streets and especially to fill the underground passages and drains of which the number

and extent was beyond all power of words to describe. The waters underneath built up and burst

in, the houses fell in and the huge metropolis was overthrown. All those parts which were built on

low ground are become marches and swamps. There was nothing visible but trees and hawthornson the upper lands, willows reeds and rushes on the lower. These crumbling ruins still more choked

the river and almost but not quite turned it back —there is no channel through to the salt ocean—it

is a vast stagnant swamp which no man dare enter since death would be his inevitable fate.‘

The theme of the deluge clearly links to contemporary anxieties created by the great public

works—and in particular the renewal of the sewers taking place in London at this time. The

metaphor of flood is also closely associated to the fear of uncontrolled flow of populations, just as

the crumbling tenement is used to evoke the dissolution of Empire from within. This whole

network of associations stabilised a certain apocalyptic vision of London’s future as its long

imperial and industrial decline gathered pace. But then history intervened to produce a ruination

whose catastrophic scope and scale created a new and more dreadful city of the dead beyond thewildest nightmares of the Anglo-gothic imagination.

And then came the Blitz

‘A generation that had gone to school of a horse drawn streetcar now stood under the sky in a

countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and beneath those clouds, in a

field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny fragile human body.‘

Walter Benjamin

‘Blitzkrieg has come to London in all its fury and brutality and filth.. Death drops from the skies. It

falls on the just and the unjust. It strikes against the weak, the humble, the unoffending. Fire, ruin,explosion, murder stalk through our streets and work their will, not without impediment, but

without any single restraint which humanity normally imposes on the devilry of man... How can

human frames parry such b lows of metal? How can human brains withstand such endless

pounding? The mighty machine rattles on and obliterates flesh and blood in its giant cogs and

pincers

Something flowers among the ruins, something so fine and noble that not all the powers of hell can

destroy it —t he courage of our people.’

London Evening Standard editorial, September 1940

‘The world of the blitz was a world in which the everyday and the unthinkable existed side by sidewith the two continuing changing place. To those living through the Blitz it often seemed as if life



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was divided by the clock, factory, office or domestic routine by day —hell and devastation let loose

when darkness fell. The courage of so called ordinary people was shown by the way they passed

from one world to the other without br eaking down or cracking up.’

Charles Madge

‘If Wrens most beautiful churches and some of the Cities most noble and historic buildings are

damaged irreparably they have taken with them in their passing some of the dreariest and meanest stretches of Victorian office building. The hun is giving us a priceless opportunity to

reconceive the city on a more rational and liveable plan…’

McDonald Hastings, London Calling, December 1940

The advent of aerial warfare, and in particular the bombardment of cities from the air, was

perhaps the single greatest instigator of twentieth-century urbanism. Since Booth’s great Survey

of London Life and Labour, the search for panoptic strategies of urban planning and governance

aimed to create standpoints from which it was possible not only to map the city’s physical

geography street by street, but to comprehend its social patterns and economic prospects as a

meaningful whole. It was never going to be easy to connect the local ethnographies produced bythe urban explorers to a wider framework of conceptual and political control; the very complexity

and scale of the territory also resisted assimilation to some omniscient, all embracing mental map.

But this project, which some think is nothing but that of modernity itself, also has its other scene,

its own gothic tale of shock and awe to impart.

Once the scope of the bird’s eye view narrows to that of a bombers gun sight, once whole

neighbourhoods can be devastated, and their populations all but annihilated in a single bombing

mission, the creation of a rational urban grid through the imposition of zoning regulations does no

more than provide a template for the more efficient application of terror from the sky. Moreover

once the explosive power and accuracy of the bomb makes total destruction of the target

possible, all that is left behind to mark the moment of impact may be a heap of rubble and dust.

Carpet-bombing destroys the ruin. The ruin works its metonymic magic by evoking the complete

edifice of which it was once a part. Its role in the urban fabric is to celebrate the triumphant

survival of form over the annihilation of function. But once reduced to formless rubble, the scene

of devastation can no longer function as a lieu de memoire. It signifies only the obliteration of all

distinction between the human world and inorganic waste, an objective correlate of the state of

numb no-thingness which overwhelms the sense of loss in cases of post-traumatic stress.

The blitzing of London, and in particular the docks, was the single most traumatic event on the

home front during the Second World War. Not because it was unexpected, or even because of the

extent of damage and suffering it caused but because it upset the official calculus of risk and itsgeographical coding. The main target of German carpet-bombing was not the heavily protected

centres of wealth and power in the West End, but the dense concentration of working class

population adjacent to main industrial arteries of trade and commerce clustered around the

docks.

The Thames Estuary lived up to its reputation for letting the enemy in through the back door by

providing a clearly visible fix for German pilots to navigate by on their way in to bomb the docks.

Fog however changed sides; no longer a treacherous dissembler of appearances, it provided a

comfort blanket protecting people whose faith in bomb shelters, let along barrage balloons and

anti-aircraft batteries was quickly dispelled by the Blitz. But ‘nature’ could not be relied upon



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either, and when the skies cleared, the fog was replaced by the smoke and flames of the burning

docks.

The second Great Fire of London posed as great a challenge to the resolution of the war artist as it

did to be the fire fighter, the air raid warden and the Dockers themselves. And they responded in a

remarkably similar way—by carrying on as usual, by denying the full impact of the horror, and yet,

at the same time being awestruck by the scale of the devastation all around.As far as English war artists were concerned business as usual meant trying to assimilate the

landscapes of the Blitz to the pictorial conventions of the gothic ruin or the picturesque landscape

as a way of asserting a sense of historical continuity with the nation’s cultural heritage.

The National Gallery may have been bombed but the aesthetic code of Turner and Constable,

many of whose paintings it housed, was indestructible—that was the message. Kenneth Clarke,

the doyen of English art critics indeed described the bombing of the East End as Picturesque. His

protégé John Piper painted the remnants of Coventry Cathedral as if it were a replica of Tintern

Abbey; his sketches of blitzed East End houses would not look out of place next to Constable’s

Hadleigh Castle.



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In contrast the blitz landscapes painted by his contemporary Graham Sutherland explored the

register of the sublime. His Devastation Series shows the twisted girders of bombed buildings

transformed into writhing organic forms as if to celebrate nature’s final redemption of the terrible

damage inflicted on the world by the hand of man.



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War photographers adopted similar conventions in their artfully composed images of the Blitz. The

famous photograph of St Paul’s standing defiantly alone and undefeated amidst a sea of flames,

offers a view of the Cathedral’s place in the national imaginary which is in a direct line of descent

from William Blake’s vision of Los.

Through the prismatic lens of romantic ruinology it was thus possible to see the war torn city interms of a familiar Anglo-gothic mise en scene and hence provide a link with its past. H. V Morton

noted at the time ‘by an ironic twist of History, the destruction of war has created ancient ruins

which dead generations could only see in dreams’. In this view the night terror s of the Blitz, these

‘furnaces of afflication’ which Charles Madge and his colleagues at Mass Observation reported as

part of the diurnal rhythm of Londoners lives was, at a deeper level, nothing but the recurrent

nightmare of a history from which there was no awakening except through the uncanny

realisation of Desolation’s ‘déjà vu’.

However most observers of the Blitz, then and now, have settled for less complicated ways of

exploiting its aesthetic possibilities; the aim has been to convey impressionistically enough, the

shock and the awe evoked by the spectacle of massive incendiary and cluster bombing. In order torender what might otherwise be unpalatable to the reader into a palette of pleasurable sense

impressions, it was enough to paint a word picture after Monet and Whistler with a nod or two at

the penny dreadful. Consider this piece of purple prose penned at the time by Mrs Gwendolyn Cox

viewing the blitzing of the docks from the safe prospect of her flat in Cholmley Gardens

Hampstead:

It was a dark and moonless night, volumes of rose pink smoke and many coloured flashes from

explosions pierced again and again the blood red cloud which, brooding and angry hung over the

city.

Fifty years later David Johnstone in the ‘City Ablaze’ recreates the scene like this:

A rainbow of shades some almost delicately radiant transfixed onlookers, deep crimson flecked

with scarlet, blue tinted with yellowy green. Vermilion edged with orange and gold —all tossing in

the north easterly gale. Each district was floodlit by its own distinct tincture. Everything seemed

grotesque and unearthly —the overall effect was another worldly nightmare, a carnival night in

hell.

He cannot, unfortunately, resist recruiting other people, supposedly there at the time to bear

witness to his prosaic flights of gothic fancy:

To 15 year old Dorothy Haring the whole scene was like a dream, the fire and the smoke, the noise

of the fire pumps and anti-aircraft guns seemed too loud to be real. More than one fireman staringout at the daylight brilliant wall of flame suffered a sensory breakdown, some were literally



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hypnotised, and others experienced mild hallucinations seeing weird forms and unreal faces in the

windblown fires. Even other firemen when seen in that light looked like strange creatures from

another world.

In contrast the Evening Standard Editorial ( see quote above) grounds its immediate response to

the Blitz in the theme first enunciated by Walter Benjamin twenty years before, of the frailty of

the human form pitted against the monstrous new war machine.Mervyn Peake, the future author of the first great post war gothic novel Gormenghast also

reinstates the body as a measure of the city’s pain, imagining Blitzed London as ravaged women:

‘Half masonry, half pain: her head

From which the plaster breaks away

Like flesh from the rough bone, is turned

Upon a neck of stones; her eyes

Are lidless windows of smashed glass,

Each star shaped pupil

Giving upon a vault so vast

How can the head contain it?’

Shapes and Sounds, 1941

This re-inscription of the organic metaphor as a central unifying image of community, nation and

state runs like a red white and blue thread through war time propaganda narratives. Divested of

terror laded imagery, this appeal to the body politic could evoke magical powers of reparation

capable of assimilating the traumatic experience of the Blitz to a quasi-natural cycle of urban

decay and renewal, which in turn is seen to be integral to a thriving city. The war ruin is thus

integrated into the harmonising compositional structures of the landscape picturesque: just

another tumbledown building overgrown with ivy.

This is the burden of Eliot’s response to the Blitz in East Coker:

‘In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by pass

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires

Houses live and die: there is a time for building

And a time for living and for generation’

In fact his raid on the inarticulate discovers a principle of eternal recurrence in London’s wartime

travails which owes more to the cosmology of Eastern religions than to any Western spiritual oraesthetic discipline. Nevertheless it was to furnish a decidedly profane principle of hope for post

war reconstruction.

It was a short step from accepting the air raids as part of a higher purpose, to seeing them as a

godsend to all those who wanted to rebuild London according to a more rational plan. The view

that Hitler’s bombers were clearing the East End of its slums more cheaply and efficiently than any

municipal bulldozer was first enunciated by MacDonald Hastings in his famous war time broadcast

on the theme (see quote above).

Even if the planners at the LCC who were put in charge of London’s post war reconstruction did

not dare to publicly voice such sentiments, it is clear from their memoirs that privately they moreor less shared this view.



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The Abercrombie Report published in 1943 was the first attempt at a comprehensive master plan

for the whole of London. Perhaps its most significant feature was that it abandoned the piecemeal

development which had hitherto characterised London’s growth and went back to Ebenezer

Howard’s model of organic growth onto which it attempted to graft a functionalist gr id. The result

was to turn London into a distributed series of self-contained improvement zones, little islands of

urban redevelopment—an unconscious mapping perhaps of the ‘stand-alone’ island story so

central to Britain’s wartime image of itself, onto its post war urban geography.

The clearing of the bomb sites not only deprived the blitz kids of their favourite haunts, it put an

end, for the moment, to the gothic revival. As Rose Macauley put it, the British have had enough

of German ruin lust to last several life times. But not everyone was happy with the result. John

Betjeman, the poet laureate of late Victorian Gothic, especially in so far as it had influenced the

vernacular architecture of London’s middle class suburbs, saw in the new developments nothing

but an act of vandalism which was completing the destruction already wrought on the capital by

the Luftwaffe. As in his famously vitriolic poem about Slough:

‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

It isn’t fit for humans now, There isn’t grass to graze a cow

Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens

Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,

Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans

Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town—

A house for ninety-seven down

And once a week for half-a-crownFor twenty years.’

The new public housing estates, both low and high rise, brought the principles of modernist design

to bear for the first time on everyday working class life on a large scale. The application of Parker

Morris standards ensured that for the inhabitants of these new model dwellings indoors offered as

much space for relaxed conviviality as out, in addition to providing a new locale for leisure

pursuits, TV and, of course, D-I-Y.

In the East End the streets were increasingly abandoned to children and the territorial rivalries of

male gangs. There was little room in the new urban order for the kind of spectral geography which

had made ‘The Smoke’ with its ‘holes and corners hidden from the honest and the well to do’

(Mayhew) such a popular haunt of the uncanny, not to mention the down and out. The post Clean

Air Act finally killed off the pea soup fogs, leaving the blackened faces of London’s public buildings

and monuments to be given a wash and brush up by municipal cleansing departments. Yet even if

the material signs of war damage could be removed, or built over, the memory traces left by the

Blitz, the hidden wounds of war could not be so easily erased. Disavowal always leaves space for

re-inscription.



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One of the more interesting examples of this was in the design for Peterlee —a new town built in

the heart of the Durham coal fields, as the North East’s answer to Milton Keynes. On the designconsultants for this project was Victor Pasmore. He started out as a lyrical landscape painter but

evolved into England’s foremost abstract painter, who applied the same formal compositional

principles of what he called ‘synthetic constructionism’ to the the layout of houses and roads in

the south western quadrant of the town. Indeed from the air the flat roofs and prefabricated

timber panels look exactly like one of his paintings; similarly the orthogonal blocks and painted

black lines of his reliefs are modelled in the pedestrian routes which cut through the housing

blocks. The centrepiece of the whole design—an ‘abstract concrete bridge over a lake—now

known as the Pasmore Pavilion—was described by him in the following terms: an architecture and

sculpture through which to walk, in which to linger and play, which can lift the activity and

psychology of an urban housing community onto a universal plane’.



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Pasmore explicitly saw town planning and abstract art as equivalent instances of a modernist

aesthetic which rejected the pictorial conventions that had hitherto dominated English landscape

painting—including much of its war time art. There was nothing picturesque or sublime about

Pasmore’s work—it invoked a cool, hard edged, architectonic form of spatiality—a kind of abstract

impressionism in that it sought to give formal precision to the otherwise chaotic sensorium of

environmental perception. Interestingly enough, even before his Peterlee adventure, much of

Pasmore’s work looked compositionally very like a plan view of the bunkers, emplacements and

other military installations which British and German architects, inspired by Bauhaus principles,

had built to defend the coasts of their respective countries from invasion during the war.

This may be coincidence—a family resemblance between different instances of the same Bauhaus

aesthetic. But this project may also bear the unconscious imprint of the trauma induced by thedestruction of the ruin as a place where loss could be mourned. For here was an art that

celebrated the indestructability of pure form, its ability to distil from the detritus of everyday life a

universal sensibility of an enduring beauty than no bomb could destroy. As if to say: we can design

and build new towns and cities that can never again be reduced to rubble —or even ruin, that are

vandal proof and will survive everything that history can throw at them.

In fact the history of Peterlee, and in particular the Pasmore Pavilion, was to prove quite

otherwise. Over the years the radical rooftop and brickwork designs have been all but been

effaced by their D-I-Y conversion into a more vernacular style—all pitched roofs and PVC windows.

If people from the housing estates did linger and play in his Pavilion it was not to ascend to the

universal but to mark the structure with the particularisms of their presence. The building quicklybecame a public ‘canvas’ for graffiti, and a meeting place for local gangs of disaffected youth; it’s



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condition has deteriorated to the point where local residents have begun to press for its

demolition as an eyesore.

So what if these post war New Jerusalem were to harbour, in the very sterility of their conception,

the seeds of their own undoing, the return of the traumatic conflicts they had repressed? How far

would this upset the confident geometry of the post war settlement between capital and labour?

Would it create the conditions for an alternative way of implementing Blake’s Vision of Los? And if so who are to be the keepers of the new ruins of modernity?

In the second part of this study, to be published in the next issue of Rising East On Line, I will

consider how a significant body of work produced by a group of contemporary writers, painters

and film makers—including Iain Sinclair, Patrick Wright, Peter Akroyd, Patrick Keiller, Jock

McFadyen and John Virtue—struggles with these questions as it seeks renew the Anglo-gothic

imagination and its capacity to address what is at stake in London’s eastwards turn.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the staff at the Borough Archive of Peterlee for their help with the

picture research related to Victor Pasmore and for permission to reproduce the related visualmaterial.

Select Bibliography

Readers who want to explore some of the issues raised in this article in greater depth might like to

consult the following:

Peter Akroyd London a biography (London 2000)

John Barrel The Infections of Thomas de Quincey (London 1991)

Christine Boyer The City and collective memory (Cambridge 1996)

Paul Brimicombe The Big Smoke (London 1987)

Gesualdo Bufalino The Keeper of ruins (London 1994)

Glenis Byron and David Punter Spectral readings—towards a gothic geography (London 2002)

Kenneth Clarke The Gothic Revival—an essay in the history of taste (London 1962)

Alain Corbin The Foul and the Fragrant (leamington 1986)

Deborah Epstein Walking the Victorian Streets (London1995)

Robert Ginsberg The Aesthetic of ruin (Oxford 2004)

G Stedman Jones Outcast London (Oxford 1971)Anne Janowitz England’s ruins (Oxford 1990)

Patrick Keillor Robinson in Space (London 1999)

Marek Kohn Dope Girls (London 1992)

Seth Koven Slumming (London 2004) (London 2001)

Eric de Mare Victorian London revealed (London 2001)

Alan Mayne The Imagined Slum (Leicester 1993)

Thomas MacFarland Romanticism and the form of ruin (Oxford 1998)

Michael Moorcock Mother London (London 1988)



Linda Nead Victorian Babylon (New Haven 2000)

Shaun O’Boyle Modern Ruins—photographic essays http: //oboylephoto. com

Susana Orega and John Stotesbury London in Literature—visionary mappings of the metropolis

(Heidelberg 2002)

Ian Sinclair Lights out for the Territory(London 1997)

Tate Modern Turner, Whistler Monet catalogue (especially the essay by Jonathon Ribner) (London

2005)

Anthony Vidler The Architectural uncanny (Massachusetts 1996)

Judith Walkovitz City of Dreadful delight (London 1992)

Patrick Wright Journey through the Ruins (London 1991)

Alexandra Warwick Lost cities: London’s Apocalypse London 2001)

Paul Zucke The Fascination of Decay (London 1968)

A New Oriental Ism - The Anglo-Gothic Imagination in the East London

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