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Some topographers take a real delight in the flux of the city, in demolition and building sites. The city artist George Scharf shows the gutting of part of London almost with glee, even when they were in the process of demolishing the bottom half of St. Martin's Lane where he lived, to make way for the Trafalgar Square developments. There is even a drawing of his own home in mid-demolitionin the 1820s.

The face of a major city is often created by identifiable power sources (commercial, religious, military, royal) prevalent at the time. In the case of seventeenth century Rome this was the Vatican. In the case of Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth century the Crown; the same city in the nineteenth century under Haussmann, the State. Though of course there is something more fundamentally French that lay behind hese; we learn, without surprise, that Descartes liked straight streets. If on the other hand we look at Washington (in the drawings of its planner l'Enfant) we see the possibility of wholesale city planning from scratch, free of historical precedent and constrictions. Even earlier Buenos Aires had established a grid plan which has been spectacular in its consistent coverage of the urban area.

In the case of New York there is a mix. The city got going in a haphazard London-y way, to be pulled up short at the beginning of the nineteenth century when order was imposed. Haphazard from the tip of Manhattan island northwards as far as City Hall (beyond which it was assumed that the city would never extend, so much so that the back of the building was left plain) the city very suddenly gets straightened up; from then on the city extended northwards within a grid pattern.

Straight streets. Precisely what we might imagine the French philosophical contribution to urbanism would be, fully realised in the boulevards of Haussmann. But this reminds us that London, in its unregulated ad-hocness is also a philosophical assertion, an assertion of laissez faire capitalism.

One just has to look at the map of modern London and Buenos Aires or Washington all at about the same time, let us say the early nineteenth century, to see the difference between the unplanned city. London in 1800 is a muddle, though not, of course without its logic. Thoroughfares are meandering. The larger and moderately unifying plans of Nash have still to be implemented. The development of the West End and the great squares of Bloomsbury and Mayfair represent some order; but the bulk of the city is random straggle, the kind of straggle, especially longitudinal, that distressed Defoe much earlier:

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