The 1926 painting that foresaw how London

would look today

Most artistic visions of Londons future have been darkly pessimistic. But this Underground poster
painted by Montague B Black in 1926 offered an uncanny and much more optimistic view of
the modern city

London 2026AD: This is All in the Air, by Montague B Black (1926). Courtesy of TFL,
from the London Transport Museum collection
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Jonathan Jones
Thursday 15 January 2015 10.03 GMT
In 1926, London Underground published a poster painted by Montague B Black, a
publicity artist who also created images for Liverpools White Star Line, which imagines
London in 2026. A golden sky enfolds a cityscape of skyscrapers over which various
types of flying machine hover.
Weve more than a decade to go to fulfil its prophecies (still time for the dirigibleto
make a comeback), but Blacks vision of London in 2026 looks remarkably similar to
a view across the City in 2015. His skyscrapers, inspired by the innovative American
cities of his own day, look remarkably like the Walkie Talkieand other contemporary
metropolitan monoliths.
Indeed, he did not picture anything quite as dramatic as the Shard. Maybe thats
because the Shard has an apocalyptic quality more reminiscent of science fiction
dystopias than utopias. For apart from its futurological accuracy, the most striking
thing about this 1926 Tube poster is its optimism.

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Front cover of Gustave Dors London: A Pilgrimage. Illustration: British Library
The vast majority of artistic visions of Londons future are darkly pessimistic. Artists
have imagined the city in ruins, in flames, forgotten, abandoned. A pioneer of such
urban sci-fi art was the Romantic architect Sir John Soane, who built theBank of
England. In 1830 Soane, who loved the melancholy ruins of Rome and their brooding

depictions by Piranesi, commissioned the artist Joseph Gandy to depict his own
architectural masterpiece as it might look far into the future:a colossal ruin.
Somehow, this way of seeing Londons future has a deep appeal. The French artist
Gustave Dor also imagines thecitys ruinous destiny in his visual report on the
city,London: A Pilgrimage, published in 1869.
The nightmare of Londons future continued to captivate artists in the 20th century,
fuelled by the dread of air war and bombing raids that gripped Britain in the 1930s. In
1937 Walter Nessler painted Premonition, a vision of London after aerial
bombardment. Nessler imagines the city as an inferno of fire, broken buildings and
melting metal, with the dome of St Pauls rising from the horror juxtaposed with a gas
mask.
Nesslers powerful painting, which hangs at the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon,
has been hailed as a premonition of the Blitz and even of more recent terrorist attacks.
It is nothing of the kind, of course. Nesslers nightmare London embodies the
widespread fear in the 1930s that cities would crumble and fall in the face of saturation
bombing.
The same pessimism about Londons future was expressed as early as 1897 in The War
of the Worlds, by HG Wells: in his apocalyptic fantasy, we are helpless to defend the
capital from the Martians until a mere virus fells them.
In the event, when London did come under futuristic attack in the Blitz, the city
survived. Its future, after all, was not as bleak as artists loved to paint it. Remarkably, it
is not the terrifying images of a doomed city conjured up by Dor and Nessler that have
come true, but Montague Blacks cheerful 1926 poster.
Perhaps there is a moral. Cities may fill us all at times with dread and foreboding, but
their power to survive and grow often makes utopian hopes a better bet.