…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 originally tried to present it 'archaeologically', encouraging the viewer to peel back each layer, going back to the earliest depictions of the contemporary city in ruins. This is still possible, if one goes to the By Century page in the menu on the left. However, I am also now trying to establish categories that cross link the temporal with the geographical. Further, I want to think through some ideas and images with strong associations to my central theme: there are brief 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.

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 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.

PLEASE NOTE: Posting on this forum is currently closed, due to several severe automated SPAM attacks. However, please see the announcement immediately below this -- I'm hoping that Wordpress's anti-SPAM tools will give me a bit more flexibility than ProjectForum's. I'd still like to hear from people, but email and/ or posting to the 'blog will be the main avenues for now.

Admin: I have posted the first full piece of commentary on the WLS project, over on my blog at Spoilheap.com. You can find it at this permalink. As this blog uses Wordpress, I'm hoping that the anti-SPAM tools will allow me to moderate SPAM more successfully than in this forum.

Future posts will all be tagged "Where London Stood."