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The optimism of the twenties, the implicit belief in the virtues of the most modern ideas is enviable. In 1926 London underground issued a poster of the city in the year 2026. What I admire about this is first of all its accuracy (not a virtue of most urban prognostication) true, we have the much cherished ideas of aircraft flitting about on the rooftops of the city but by and large it is not wrong. What is admirable is the profile of St Paul's still there, still distinguishable as is Tower Bridge; but our artist has had no compunctions in crowding it around with modern buildings that dwarf it. What a loss of confidence has taken place since then, such that now we are all more or less convinced that a building that threatens to put a shadow over St Paul's is somehow a usurper. The interesting thing about the London Underground forecast, for all its playfulness, is that St Paul's actually gains in dignity by the smallness of its recognisable shape, a possibility that lies way beyond the ken of such as Prince Charles.

This vision of London precedes by a few years the great and definitive future vision of the 1930s. In Brave New World Huxley writes:

"He put his forward propellor into gear and headed the machine towards London. Behind them, in the west, the crimson and orange were almost faded; a dark bank of cloud had crept into the zenith.....landing on the roof of Henry's forty-story apartment house in Westminster they went straight down to the dining hall.....At twenty past nine they walked across the street to the Westminster Abbey Cabaret...they entered....On the domed ceiling of the hall the colour-organ had momentarily painted a tropical sunset..."

This is deliciously thirties. Just as Orwell's London of 1984 is inherently forties:

"A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape."

Of course nothing dates like predictions of the future; one might almost say that it is precisely in predictions of the future that we have a kind of synthesis of all those design features, attitudes, aspirations, preoccupations of any one age. Both these extracts, from Huxley and Orwell, arouse
extraordinary...well, extraordinary what...?

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