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In Poe's City in the Sea

"...light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free
Up domes -up spires -up kingly walls
Up fanes -up Babylon-like walls"

Leo Claretie in 1886 describes the Ruins of Paris in his 'Paris depuis ses origines jusqu'en l'an 3000.'

Indeed this seems to be a perennial theme, as old as the city itself. The demise of major cities is a common Biblical theme. In the latter part of this century we have the tradition of disaster movies, such as Earthquake (with Sensurround, let us not forget!) and the depradations of Godzilla. The Godzilla tradition remains curiously potent, for all the absurdity of a man in a rubber lizard suit jumping waist high through the balsawood debris of devastated Tokyo. If there is a film which echoes the elegaic post-piece of Dore's London it is Escape from New York by John Carpenter. The conceit here is that Manhattan has become so irretrievably lawless that it has simply been ringed by a massive wall and turned, in its entirety, into a huge penitentiary. Fires flicker in the devastated streets; we hear in the distance the crunch of tyres on broken glass and a curious tinkling as the limousine of the Lord of New York approaches. The huge car rocks slowly towards us, the chandeliers welded to its hood jingle menacingly.

New York was of course always the site of imagined urban apocalypses. In Planet of the Apes we are on a beach; as we round a headland ahead of us, half buried in the sands, like Ozymandias, is the Statue of Liberty.

In real life too we have premonitions of urban apocalypse. In Bombay I stood at mid afternoon in a terrible heat on the promenade of the great Chaupathi Marine Drive and thought, I have been here before; the same great curve of the bay, fringed , mile after mile by palms; to my right an ocean immobilised by pollution; to my left, six lanes of traffic glittering away into the sun-whitened distance; on the farside of the parade dilapidated condominiums; and I suddenly realised; yes, like Copacabana! like the Avenida Atlantica! but post-nuclear holocaust. I was alone except for the woman who mixed me a lemon drink.

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