…some hunter may express
Wonder like ours,
When through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Horace Smith (1817)
These pages arose from a course that I took, in the winter of 2000, looking at the history of landscape representation in the West. The course required the production of a set of webpages. Since that initial assignment, the project has begun to take on a life of its own.
Much of the rural imagery from the works of the Romantics included aestheticised, picturesque ruins from a previous age (usually, although not always, Classical temples, columns and statues). Early on, I noticed similarities between these images and images of the modern city in ruins in various Science Fiction films or read descriptions of in Science Fiction novels. It occurred to me that the image of a well-known city in ruins was a powerful one that people might use in a variety of ways to express a variety of ideas. What does it mean? Why the fascination?
At this stage, I just want to pull together as many different sources as possible, place them into different categories, and draw out any connecting ideas. In presenting this material, I'm going to try to present it 'archaeologically', encouraging the viewer to peel back each layer, going back to the earliest depictions of the contemporary city in ruins. I also want to think about some associated versions of the same theme. There are some notes on the archaeological processes behind the formation of a ruined building and also a section on 'follies' in the guise of ancient ruins.
Bear in mind that these pages are a kind of online notebook, meant to help me to arrive at my own understanding of the subject.
About the WLS Wiki
As part of an experiment, further development of the project will take place in this wiki. Hopefully, this will make the addition of new content a lot easier than "traditional" HTML pages. A second spiffy feature of the wiki is RSS. For those not in the know, it allows one to keep track of changing content on webpages, automatically announcing updates. Here's a link to the BBC's Help page on RSS.
Although the main content of these pages is locked, I'd be extremely grateful for any posts with comments, suggestions, links, pictures, etc etc. Note that I am keen to retain overall control of the project (which die-hard adherents of wikis, copylefting, and the open source movement will find an anathema). However, whatever final form Where London Stood takes, I can guarantee there will be at least an Acknowledgements section at the very least.
Oh, and if you do post, be sure to leave a link to a home page so I can swing by your site.
Posted at Jul 01/2006 08:46AM:
David Platt: Friends, I'm afraid that I'm locking these pages, as of today. The frequency of Spam attacks has been increasing over the last few weeks, and this makes maintaining the projects pages a chore. Each link that a Spammer inserts into his/her text creates a new page in this project. Deleting each page isn't too much of a problem, but the typical spam post seems to include around 50 links. I am extremely disappointed that I've had to take this action and I hope that you'll all understand.
I do still like hearing from people, and you can still send comments via email (see the link in my name at the start of this post). If you would like, I can add any comments that you'd like to post to the WLS wiki.
Posted at Aug 19/2006 03:35PM:
David Platt: Several individuals and groups using the Traumwerk site seem to have been hit by spammers, this summer. This continues to be a nuisance. For now, I'm going to keep the comments function turned off. However, if you would like to leave a comment here, just drop me a line via email (follow the link from my highlighted name to see my profile page and email address).
