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The master of this genre was John Martin. He painted: The Fall of Babylon; The Destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii; The Seventh Plague of Egypt; The Fall of Nineveh; The Destruction of Tyre. And, above all, The Great Day of His Wrath, in which (as a mere background detail) an entire city has been wrathfully tossed into the air and actually hangs upside down. Where, psychoanalytically speaking, this attraction for mass destruction came from in this slightly prim man from Newcastle is a mystery. But his appetite for it is clear; he even spots potential disaster in London, which, sunk as it is into its clay bed, one would not imagine was ripe for Biblical cataclysm:

"If this river were rendered unnavigable London would soon become a heap of ruins like Nineveh or Babylon."

Martin was a bad painter, but didn't seem to know it. This is a good thing because he went on, with panache, painting these wonderfully absurd extravaganzas. In fact a revisit of the Great Day of his Wrath makes me think again. I had not noticed a cute little upturned nude in the bottom left hand corner, (she too swept up into the apocalyptic maelstrom) who might have been painted by Boucher himself.) Martin's instinct for disaster matches up curiously with his earnest concerns with sewage projects and general urban tidy-mindedness. His work did actually feedback into architecture itself. These visions of Nineveh or Babylon are supposedly about the past but could actually be said to be visions of possible futures. Their architectural features echoed (or even influenced) warehouses in Manchester and the Midlands. One writer believes that paintings such as Belshazzar's Feast... "helped suggest appropriate styling for the railway cuttings, bridges and stations on the Liverpool to Manchester railway." Brunel's intensely grandiose and passionate engineering could easily have been influenced by Martin. All those fires and jets of pestilential plague and upheaval of the urban fabric supposedly so biblical, belong clearly to the Industrial Revolution.

While Martin's fantasies actually seemed remote, fantastic, improbable he left it to his fanatical brotherJonathan to depict (not ineptly) the ruin of London itself. London's Overthrow (1832) shows an Apocalypse of biblical literalness. A strange leonine beast hovers above the City. St Paul's is in flames. Clouds churn above Westminster. Snakes writhe at the feet of rampant devils.

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