In this talk at the Museum of London for the "Night Museum" series in October 2016, Dr Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London) considers the post-apocalyptic London imaginary, from H G Wells, Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing, to the disturbing urban fantasies of contemporary writers such as China Miéville and Alan Moore.

1. Dr Caroline Edwards
Birkbeck, University of London
caroline.edwards@bbk.ac.uk
Dark City: London
After the Apocalypse

2. 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.

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

4. Richard Jefferies, After London,
or, Wild England (1885)
Caspar David Friedrich, Klosterruine Eldena (c.1825)

5. 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

6. 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

7. The Exodus from London

8. “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).

9. 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)

10. 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])

11. 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)

12. After London: island havens and
four-gated cities

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

14. “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]

15. 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

16. 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

17. Reviving Guy Fawkes for the Thatcher Era
From Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V
for Vendetta (1988-9)

18. 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)