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Basically the city is too big to represent. The ways topographers cope graphically with the enormity of the city is fascinating, a matter of great virtuosity, imagination, stylisation. The greatest seventeenth century view is Wencelaus Hollar's "Long View", ostensibly from the tower of Southwark Cathedral, and made shortly before the Fire. Even here though a 'tour de force' of falsification, since the view is made from a non-existent outlook, all subsequent perspective conforming to this hypothetical point.

Artists of London had to cope with the rambling diffuseness of the city of one million inhabitants, a city that Defoe as early as 1711 had perceived as "straggling and confused." The panorama became the fashion, though early panoramas were vehicles for display and (as we saw earlier) not topographically trustworthy. If we want to know what London looked like 200 years ago we need to look at what remains of Girtin's panorama, admirably prosaic, done from the roof of one of the first new industrial buildings in the city: Albion Mills; (glimpses of the rooftop that was his workspace shock in their functional modernity).

The eighteen foot Thames-side Grand Panorama of London (1843) is a thrill; I unfold it the length of my underlit hall and trace it left to right, in all its grand and finicky, noble and ignoble detail from Westminster to Deptford, from the glitter of the West End to the sallow squalor of the East End. We are coasting along only one bank; the bulk of London lies hidden behind the strip of Thamesside building (much of it nondescript warehouses, wharves) but we have an intense sense of the biggest city in the world, the dank sinister city of de Quincey and Dickens, that lies behind.

So, long before the advent of film, London, (the New York of 1800) had problems to solve in its self-representation. In NY similar challenges awaited solution. The common view of Manhattan remains that of a dense cluster of downtown skyscrapers. Its verticality was novel and stunning. Louis-Ferdinand Celine vividly describes New York "qui se tenait bien raide…raide à faire peur"…that is: scarily erect. But the truth is that most of the building of the island of Manhattan is quite low rise. Indeed low rise is a feature of cities in the States. In her essay on Chicago, Jan Morris reminds us that in "the whole of Chicago, home of the world's tallest skyscraper (this was the eighties; Sears Tower had not yet relinquished its title to the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur) and the tallest residential building too, the average height of structures is two and a half stories". Indeed nineteenth century pre-high rise views of New York, of Chicago, of the big new cities of the Mid West, vaunt their horizontal bigness . True, the rubber necking gaper (myself) is seduced by the drama of verticality, but the real massiveness of the big city actually lies in extent, in the horizontal. It is the sheer straight lengths of Manhattan that thrill me most. I recall almost swaying at the edge of the sidewalk, with a horizontal vertigo, looking down the entire length of Tenth Avenue from 145th Street. I thrilled to walking the "longest single street in the world", Avenida Rivadavia in Buenos Aires; (an unverifiable claim of course; what is a street?
But I like the civic pride behind it!)

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