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Scarier are the sudden vignettes . The drug addict outside Termini Station in Rome stripped to the waist with a length of rubber tubing sewn into his chest. Or signs, simple signs, that suddenly appear alarmingly ominous. A few hundred yards from my flat there recently appeared a police sign asking for witnesses to some late night violence. It said that the man sought was (and I quote exactly, capital letters):

CARRYING A BURNING NEWSPAPER.
SHOUTING RACIAL ABUSE.

Visions, too, of epic destruction. In 1831 Freidrich von Raumer looked down from the tower of Notre Dame…"I was able to take in this gigantic city. Who built the first house, and when will the last one collapse? When will the ground of Paris look like that of Thebes or Babylon?"

There is a compulsion in the nineteenth century to flirt with the idea of urban devastation. In Poe's tale Mellonta Tauta (1848) he describes a balloon journey in the year 2048 over a New York, now long laid waste:

"The disastrous earthquake…of the year 2050…totally uprooted and overwhelmed the town…..the entire area…was, about eight hundred years ago, densely packed with houses, some of them twenty storeys high…"

Of all Dore's London engravings the least reproduced is an odd evocation of a ruined London of the future. It echoes Macaulay's vision of a London shattered like Greece and Rome, "when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of vast solitude, take a stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's".

Throughout the nineteenth century there was a tradition of ruined cities, devastated cities, submerged cities, satanic cities, cities aflame. Keats writes of Hyperion that it…

"Glared a blood red through all its thousand courts' Arches and domes and fiery galleries"

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