A new orientalism?

The Anglo-Gothic imagination in East London

by Phil Cohen

Some reflections on the Gothic Revival in East End Literature

Introduction: an everyday story of the Barbaresque At the beginning of 1995, the London Evening Standard ran a series of special reports on the condition of East London, under the title The Betrayed. The declared aim was to reveal how so many of its citizens live an underprivileged existence in the shadow of the success of this great capital. The series rehearsed many of the key themes of a journalistic campaign run over a century earlier by WT Snead in the Pall Mall Gazettein a series of articles on juvenile crime, female prostitution and urban decay under the title the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon which did much to set the terms of public debate and intervention into the life of the East End from the 1880s until the First World War and beyond. The Standard report examined what it called the blood-stained face of race relations in East London, exacerbated by poverty and disease. The front page showed a picture of white youth, under the caption: Cannon Street Whitechapel and the random victim of an Asian gang stumble to safety, his head pouring with blood. This picture is used to introduce and in a sense anchor the main theme of the report, which is that Bangladeshi gangs are on the rampage, picking on innocent white people in a form of reverse racism, committing gratuitous acts of revenge for the harassment they have suffered over the years at the hands of white East Enders. This message is underlined on the inside cover, where there is a photograph of a group of Bangladeshi boys lined up across a street, in a gangsta-style they shall not pass pose. Of course, this graphic realism is no less constructed than the meaning of the picture itself. But what seems so peculiar about the text that is supposed to authenticate it, is that it is couched in such florid sensationalist terms, as if it were a piece of popular fiction, rather than a demonstration of sociological fact. The introductory paragraph gives the flavour, and is worth quoting in full: By the time we reached the street there was blood everywhere. The muffled crash we heard while we were talking in the Golden Lion Social Club must have been the bottle breaking on his head. Under the streetlights, the bloodied glass was being ground into the pavement by the boots that came again and again, pounding at the strangers body. They were about 20 of them and they all ran off together, melting into the night. Their victim looked like he had blundered out of a Tarantino movie. He was spitting out the blood trickling into his mouth. His companion, although unharmed, was clearly in shock. We were just walking back from the pub. It sounded like a pathetic bleat of protest. Why us? Such a question on a dark night in Cannon Street Whitechapel can only be rhetorical. He knew why and so did we. His friend, gathering his wits, dabbed at the blood in his eyes. He was in no doubt. Its because were white, mate. We are back in the torrid world of Victorian melodrama and slum fiction, now remade into a Tarantino movie. As readers we are deliberately turned into the spectators of a piece of cinema or street theatre, which has been staged for our benefit. The dramatic quality of the mise en scene is enhanced by not revealing the colour of victim and assailant until the last sentence. The holding
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back of the key racial descriptor (its because were white, mate) and its sudden revelation functions as a kind of denouement, a shock tactic designed to encapsulate the main point of the argument: Attacks, assaults, hatredthere is a mood of gothic barbarity amongst the poor and the angry encapsulated in this warning by the 21-year-old posse leader in the Golden Lion Social Club. We are the majority, we are strong. If anyone gives us trouble we will hurt them. Yes, that much is known. We have the picture that proves it. The reference to the gothic has a double meaning in this context. It certainly evokes a return to a new dark ages brought about by the advent of an alien, uncivilized anti-Christian power in our midst. Islamaphobia rules OK! This, too, is a well-rehearsed theme. The Victorian urban explorers frequently used racial imagery to define the natives of the East End as primitives; with the settlement of colonies of Chinese, Malays, and Africans in Docklands areas, and then the advent of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, the non-Christian, non-occidental character of the area became a topic of increasing public concern. Just as the West End was sharpening its image as the cosmopolitan hub of a worldwide Empire, so it was felt to be increasingly menaced by the East End as a kind of Internal Orient, a dark mysterious continent whose dense localisms formed the heart of That Other England, where the Empire was already preparing to strike back.

Its first cartographer was Thomas De Quincey. In The Confessions of an English Opium Eater he discusses his experiences with the oriental drug and his explorations as an East End flaneur in almost identical terms. His dreams are crowded with turbulent processions of Chinese and Malays, in street bazaars where he is forever lost and wandering in search of forbidden pleasures, pursued by the monstrous fauna and flora of the Ganges and the Nile. Then he describes himself walking in an East End surrounded on all sides with a sea of myriad shapes in which everything fluctuates as I seek to find an individual human face within the indistinguishable mass of this surplus population so reminiscent of the swarming continent of Asia.

De Quincey also observes in the language and gestures of this East Enders the subtle signs of subversion, the Jacobin influence. He is both fascinated by the promiscuity of the urban crowd and fears its powers of social contagion and combination, and he locates both in an imaginary geography where the East represents what he calls the barbaresque: the negation of everything that the West stands for. As John Barrell shows in his important study, De Quinceys fear of being contaminated by physical or social contact was also an important theme in his anti-Semitism. In one notorious passage he writes of mens natural abhorrence of the Jewish taint, as once in Jerusalem they had hated the leprosy and cholera (oriental diseases), because even while they raved against it the secret proofs of it could be detected amongst their own kindred. In the portrayal of the East End as a centre of foreign immigration, anti-Semitism and orientalism increasingly converged in constructing an alien threat which is both global in scope and intensely local in effect. In the process, Jews are increasingly confused with Orientals. For example one of the witnesses from a local community settlement cross-examined during the police enquiry into the Jack the Ripper murders described living conditions in the Jewish quarters in the following terms: There is something of the Oriental bazaar about the Jewish market, the swarms of unkempt children running hither and thither on countless errands, the women haggling with each other, shouting to make themselves heard over the general hubbub, the men scurrying in and out of dark alleyways, the whole effect is one of labyrinthine confusion which can scarcely fail to make a fearful impression on the casual visitor. In the sober deliberations from the House of Commons Select Committee on Housing in 1901 we find the following exchange: Lord Robert Cecil: What do you say about the inhabitants? Lord Lupton: Most of the inhabitants are Jews and their habits are said to be clean so far as their persons go, but certainly the courts outside their houses are Lord Robert Cecil: Eastern in character. Lord Lupton: Yes that is so exactly. The Jews referred to were of course Ashkenazes from the shetls of Eastern Europe, not Sephardis from North Africa or the Middle East, but this conflation is entirely characteristic of both popular and official perceptions of the period. At the same time, moral panics around drugs and sexuality that focused on the Chinese community of Limehouse in the late Victorian and Edwardian period included many features borrowed from anti-Semitism. As Marek Kohn has shown, the theme of a criminal underworld organized by a secret oriental conspiracy, which was popularized by Sax Rohmer in his Fu Manchu novels, owed much of its logic to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Another point of convergence was the white slave trade. If opium was a medium of seduction of white women by men of colour, their induction into oriental perversity was supposed to lead inexorably to their final fall into the hands of Jewish pimps who shipped them out to the brothels of the Middle East. Finally, the Asian and Jewish communities were accused of a common duplicity; the outward appearance of respectability and even prosperity was only a cloak for hidden cruelty or corruption undermining both family and nation. Jewish money allied to Oriental vice was a channel linking East End with West End, directly injecting moral infection into the civilized heart of the metropolis.

This close articulation of Orientalism and Anti-Semitism has been an important element in both literary and journalistic representations of the East End over the past century. But it is important to stress that the idea of the East End as an internal orient was not confined in its application to Jews. The Irish and English working class were also recruitedcockney urchins, for example, were routinely redescribed as street Arabs. What this form of Orientalism drew upon and radicalized was a certain more general way of thinking and feeling about the city, and in particular its spectral geographies, its other scenes in which the gothic has played a central role. This tradition has been powerfully renewed in much recent writing and painting which takes Londons post-industrial development to the east of the City as its subject. In the second part of this study I will be looking at this body of work in some detail, in order to analyse its relation to the cultural turn in regeneration. In this first part of the study I want to trace and situate its provenance in a broader historical perspective. Bare ruined choirs High Towers, faire temples, goodly theatres strong walls, rich porches, princely palaces large streets, brave houses, sacred sepulchres All those ( o pitie) now are turned to dust and overgrown by black oblivions dirt. Edmund Spenser, The Ruins of Time It is often our mightiest projects that betray the degree of our insecurity. We gaze at them in wondera kind of wonder which is itself a form of dawning horror, for we know somehow by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them and are designated from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins. WG Sebald, Austerlitz In an essay on the peculiarities of English modernism, Eric Hobsbawm has argued that its roots were paradoxically gothic: In the smoky workshop of the world, a society of egoism and aesthetic vandals, where the small craftsman so visible elsewhere in Europe could no longer be seen in the fog generated by the factories, the medievalism of peasants and artisans had long seemed a model of a society both socially and artistically more satisfactory. The argument skilfully points up the possible continuities, as well as the tension between the antiindustrial, anti-urban bias of many English socialists and social reformers, such as John Ruskin and Ebenezer Howard, and the aristocratic taste for the gothic and its revival in late Victorian literature and the arts. If the Gothic imagination provided a privileged medium for the English encounter with modernism, it was because it provided both a language and a landscape in which the ghosts in the machinery of industrial capitalismthe hidden hands who kept its engines of growth in motioncould first be called up and then, if not laid to rest, at least usefully employed in the historical task of accomplishing its downfall and final ruin. The typical mise en scene of the gothic novel features half-destroyed structures, often ancient, or mediaeval (and more recently modern) buildings which have either fallen into decay or disrepair, or been subject to attack, through vandalism or bombardment. These buildings contain secret chambers, subterranean passages, trapdoors, underground vaults, putrefying corpses, all of which have an important narrative function in evoking a past that has been forgotten or ignored, rather than cultivated or celebrated as a living heritage and which returns as a threatening or disruptive

force. The gothic thus represents what has been repressed or made unrepresentable by modernity but which returns to haunt it. According to this line of thinking, if capitalism established itself as the great civilization of modernity by destroying the modes of production that preceded it, it was only to give birth to a force that would one day just as violently supersede it; the mission of the Anglo-Gothic imagination was to give this process a local habitation and a name: William Blake called it Los; those who followed in his footsteps spoke of Babylon: an outcast London whose grandest architectures remain overshadowed by sepulchral ruins, and whose brightest thoroughfares are haunted by an afflicted populace, bodies and minds ravaged by what capital had made of them. Blake sets the scene: I wandered through each chartered street Near where the chartered Thames does flow And marked in every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of woe I also stood in Satans bosom and beheld its desolations: A ruined man, a ruind building of God, not made with hands Its mountains of marble terrible Its pits and declivities flowing with molten ore and fountains Of pitch and nitre; its ruind palaces &d cities & mighty works Its furnaces of affliction in which his Angels and Emanations Labour with blackened visages among its stupendous ruins Arches, & pyramids and porches, colonnades and domes, In which dwells Mystery, Babylon Those who followed in his footsteps as explorers of London Babylon were not always as anxious as Blake to resist the assimilation of ruin sentiment to the picturesque. His apocalyptic vision of history, in which the dreadful has already happened, his evocations of the Uncanny, that twilight world in which the living and the dead, the animate and inanimate, become strangely confused, has, however provided a major resource for writers and painters attracted to what might be called the metropolitan sublime. They have given us a city whose traffic with the world follows mysterious lines of desire not to be found on any planners map: itineraries and encounters with Londons other scene, which the long march of municipal improvement has tried in vain to sweep from the streets. Anywhere the urban underclass and the bohemian demi-monde mingle and trade, under whatever namethe slum, the rookery, the red light district, the immigrant quarter, the zone of transitiongenerates its own hidden economy whose highly social but nevertheless largely immaterial forms of productivity point to the limits of the fully rationalized city. It is in and through these sites, at any rate, that the Anglo-Gothic imagination has made itself fully at home in the idioms of metropolitan modernity. Moreover, if the dynamism of the modern city, driven by the monstrous productivity of capital was to be its own downfall, then at least its proletarian gravediggers had to be trained up as future keepers of the ruins. This was the pedagogic task which the artists and poets of the Romantic Movement assigned to themselves, and which marked out their ambivalent identification, as a self-conscious Bohemian intelligentsia, with the liberation struggles of the oppressed urban masses.

Rejecting the picturesque rural scene in favour of the sublime terrors of the metropolitan abyss, it was not difficult for a Poe, a Baudelaire, or an ETA Hoffman, even, nearer home, for a James Thompson or Arthur Machen, to discover the labyrinth, the secret passage, the dungeon, and all the other characteristic devices of the gothic mise en scene in the wastelands of the workingclass city with its maze of courtyards and alleyways, its cellars and dead ends. In their hands the eighteenth-century gothic ruin with its tottring battlements dressed with rampant ivys unchecked growth is relocated in the dilapidated tenements and dark Satanic mills where the dangerous, perishing and labouring classes were confined. In urbanizing and modernizing the ruin, their aim was purely cartographic; as good Bohemians they wanted to map the territory, to conserve its danger and its difference, not to reform or translate it into some approximation of the bourgeois thing. James Thompson in The City of Dreadful Night (1874) made the link between the ancient and the modern in these terms: The city is ruinous, although Great ruins of an unremembered past With others of a few short years ago More sad and found within its precincts vast. This promiscuous intermingling of ruins created a spectral geography in which distinctions of wealth and poverty were magically erased. These connoisseurs of urban dereliction were too invested in ruin sentiment and what might still be excavated imaginatively from itthe evidence of a long and continuous national history, in which ruptures and breaks, even the devastations of war, could be recuperated as part of an organic (albeit entirely invented) traditionto want to see the slums of the Victorian city demolished altogether. Their plan view of London Babylon thus had little concern with such mundane matters as street lighting, sanitation and new model dwellings, let alone the Clean Air Act. Such improvements would only have the effect of destroying the city as an aesthetic resource. The capital city envisioned by the Fabians and other municipal reformers who were to found the London County Council was neither mysterious, awesome, terrifying or sublime; their modest programme of public works and parks, their hygienic vision of Suburbia, was as useless for entertaining the prospect of revolution as for contemplating the retrospect of civilizational decay and decline. But it was the Bourgeois Fabians not the Bohemian Conservationists who won the day. In the 1860s and 70s more of London was rebuilt that at any time since the Great Fire of 1666. As Lynda Nead has shown, large parts of the central and inner city were turned into a vast building site, as the Metropolitan board of works and the railway companies undertook the widening and straightening of roads, creating new thoroughfares levelling and tunnelling wherever they went. In

a novel of the period that saw the upheaval of modernization in frankly apocalyptic terms, the hero remarks: I was astounded in coming again into the busy city to observe great changes wrought in its appearance. Some of the bridges over the river that I had left intact were nearly demolished and others were springing up supplant them. Market place hotel and houses were in ruins or had put on a new aspect. Arches had risen over many thoroughfares and trains swept above and between houses to the jeopardy of upper tenements and tenants. What with the digging and pulling down, building and improving I could scarcely recognize the old streets But these improvements were unevenly distributed. The main effect was to clear large areas of Holborn and Westminster of its residual rookeries and drive outcast London eastwards. The Mile End Road and the Peoples Palace also exemplified the new municipalism, but as for the rest, London became an increasingly visible tale of two cities: The West End as the glittering home to the conspicuous consumption of a new leisure class; and the East End, where home-grown workshop industries joined hands with international trade and commerce to support a large, almost exclusively working-class population and a hidden economy which provided a major additional resource for the areas diverse immigrant communities. There were two responses to this new spatial alignment of leisure and labour, wealth and poverty. The first, focused on East London itself, we have already briefly characterized as a form of internal Orientalism, drawing on the tropes, and characterology of popular gothic literature to construct the area as wholly Other, and its denizens as members of a race apart. WT Snead in the The Maiden Tribute) already referred to, drew on the imagery of the Book of Revelation, with its vision of the apocalyptic destruction of cities, to explore that strange inverted world that is the London labyrinth and portrays the dreadful consequences of allowing a great part of the capital to become a den of iniquity. Although Mayhew and Booth eschewed such overt religious imagery, their accounts of East Londons life and labour, for all their claims to ethnographic authenticity or scientific objectivity were not averse to taking a leaf or two out of Dickens books (especially Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son) to graft some kind of realism onto material that all too readily lent itself to the sensational emplotments of the gothic novel. Through these various narrative devices the East End was sealed off as a site of urban dereliction: either rendered into a mysterious underworld entirely enclosed within its own densely impenetrable meanings, or else shown as a capillary power structure surreptitiously infiltrating the over world through the traffic in dangerous drugs, sex, and ideas. The docks and their immediate hinterlands became central to this new iconography because they could be made to represent both versions of the story: an intensely local, almost closed community which nevertheless controlled a key artery of international trade; a potent force in the organized labour movement and the new unionism but an equally significant presence in the East Ends hidden economy. Little wonder that the Dockers themselves played such an important role in what the East End was made to represent about the state of the nation as a whole: at once the backbone of the nation and a race apart, patriotic cockneys and congenital crooks, heroic boxers and athletes, as well as sexual rough trade; the figure of the docker in its very duplicity came to focus all the ambivalent identifications which both bourgeois and bohemian entertained towards the East End and its diversely dangerous classes.

The second response to the modernizing process was to focus on the West End and the City and apply the devices of romantic ruinology to the task of deconstructing its pretensions of power as exemplified in its great public buildings.

Hubert Robert had first popularized the genre by imagining the Louvre in ruinssacked by a victorious proletariat, a visual polemic made by a disgruntled aristocrat shortly after the fall of the Bastille. In similar fashion Joseph Gandy depicted the newly built Bank of England as a classical Piranesi ruin and the Compte de Volney in his classic account of Revolution and Empire produced numerous imaginary pictures of the great cities of the world in ruins to illustrate his pessimistic thesis about the rise and fall of civilizations, in an argument which bears closely on Marxs observations about the mutual ruin of the contending classes.

In 1872 the French engraver Gustave Dore teamed up with travel writer Blanchard Jerrold to produce London: A Pilgrimage, a guided tour of the city based on a geography of contrasts between high society and lowlife, West End and East. Dore had a profound fascination with the grotesque; he illustrated Grimms Fairy Tales, Poes short stories, Dantes Divine Comedy. In what was ostensibly a travel book, he uses his skill with chiaroscuro effects to depict the tale of two citiesone of glittering light and the other of murky depths, associated here not so much with capital and labour as with the worlds of the rentier and the criminal. His pictures of slum housing have been endlessly reproduced and, for example, provided the visual inspiration for the Crown Film Units classic inter-war documentary on the subject, which in turn had an important influence of post war urban planning. But for all that he was not after documentary realism, but its gothic equivalent. We can see this is an etching captioned a New Zealander contemplating the ruins of a once great and powerful city. It shows an artist seated on a broken arch of London Bridge sketching a cathedral like ruin. On closer inspection this building turns out not to be a church but the brand new Cannon Street Station (completed in 1873) here imagined with the cast iron piers of the

bridge rusting away in the tidal ooze. The railway whose coming had done so much to transform London into a modern metropolis is thus rendered into a piece of obsolete industrial archaeology. This conceit gives a new twist to an old tale. The figure of the native from the new world contemplating the ruins of London was already well established by the time Dore came to depict his version of the scene. It was mentioned by Gibbon in his study of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and also in a throwaway comment by Macauley. In Archimago, a gothic ruin novel published in 1864, the scene is vividly described: I sit upon the last crumbling stones of that bridge, erst the famous London Bridge Pavement, footway, parapet abutment pillar, pier all are gone and I on the last few mouldering stones survey the ruind and desolate city. Subsequently, Dores picture, with its theme of the artist triumphantly surveying (and surviving) the destruction of modern technology has been taken up by Michael Moorcock, one of the key figures in the contemporary renaissance of urban ruin fiction. In Mother London and in a series of science fiction stories written from the vantage point of the late twenty-first century Moorcock has been concerned to construct an archaeology of the present in the form of a counterfactual history in which modernity is just a blip on the screen. And true to Hobsbawms formula, he imagines the future as a regression to a mediaeval world of villages and primitive agriculture: We reached the ancient village of Suthuk which is on the edge of the river bed of the Thames, most of which is reclaimed land planted with cabbages, the export of which form the principle staple of the country. Our first destination was the vestiges of the once famous Lun-dun Bridge mentioned in many ancient accounts and in one folk lore ballad which has come down to us beginning Lun-Dun bridge is falling down Several arches of this structure now span the intervening space between the village of Suthuk and the extremely picturesque ruins which are visible on the summit of an opposite eminence. These ruins are all that is left of the once famous Cockni cathedral of St Pauls. Several benighted peasants we are told claim to be the last survivors of the tribe of the Cocknies now began to gather round us and to offer for barter certain objects they had dug up-many of which possessed a certain archaeological interest. Altogether the impression made on us was one of admiration mingled with awe and wonder at these monuments of a past civilization. No doubt it seemed to the inhabitants of ancient Angleland and their mighty city of Lun-dun that they would escape the fate that had overtaken Assyria, Egypt Greece and Rome, that the solidity of their structures would escape the tooth of time, But although they have thus passed away and left nothing but these relics to attest to their former glory yet the English people played their part in the hastening the ultimate civilisation of the world and its adjacent planets which we today witness. Indeed there are few places which promise a great attract for a summer holiday that the ruins of ancient Lun-dun. All that is solid melts into fog and marsh I watched the sun On lurid morns on monstrous afternoons Push out through fog with his dilated disk And startle the slant roofs and chimney pots With splashes of fierce colour. or I saw
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Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog Involve the passive city, strangle it Alive, and draw it into the void Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge Had wiped out Londonor as noon and night Had clapped together and utterly struck out The intermediate time, undoing themselves In the act.. Your city poets see such things. But sit in London at the days decline And view the city perish in the mist Like Pharaohs armaments in the deep red sea Then surprised By a sudden sense of vision and of tune You feel as conquerors though you did not fight Elisabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 1857 Picture a land of mist and mud London as an immense, sprawling rain drenched metropolis stinking of soot and hot iron and wrapped in a perpetual mantle of smoke and fog ceaseless activity in warehouses and on wharves washed by the dark slimy waters of an imaginary Thames in the midst of the forest of masts, a tangle of beams and girders piercing the pale lowering clouds. Up above trains raced by at full speed and down in the underground sewers others rumbled along occasionally emitting ghastly screams or vomiting floods of smoke through the gaping mouths of airshafts Huysmans A Rebours (1884) Unreal city Under the brown fog of a winter dawn A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many I had not thought death had undone so many. TS Eliot, The Wasteland At night, while he was working on the London Pilgrimage, Dore, accompanied by a minder, wandered the streets of Limehouse and Cable street with sketch pad in hand, part flaneur, part slummer, part artist in residence. But his days were spent at the Caf Royal, mixing in what was then known as the haute boheme Oscar Wilde was a member of the circle and so too was James McNeill Whistler and Claude Monet while they were in town to paint the Thames red, yellow, vermillion and green. Both artists has been attracted to London by a phenomenon which served to blur the outlines of its distinctive and divided social geographyit famous fogs. The smoke was Victorian and Edwardian Londons second name. Peasoupers turned day into night, rendered the most modern parts of the metropolis once more mysterious, and terrifying; under the brown fog of a winter dawn even the most brightly lit and open thoroughfares suddenly became spectral and unreal places, traffic ground to a halt, and thousands of Londoners, especially the very young and the old, suffered and died prematurely of respiratory illness.

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The Thames was the prime attractor of fogs, whose cause, of course, lay principally elsewhere, in the large scale domestic and industrial burning of coal throughout the city. But this association between metropolitan miasma and an increasingly polluted river (the Thames was in effect an open sewer carrying both industrial and human waste leading to the Great Stink of 1851) enhanced the scandal that was Babylon; Ruskin in Storm, cloud of the 19th century portrayed fog as a physical sign not just of industrialism but of its morally polluting effect on the human condition while Huysmans elaborated a whole cartography of special landscape effects predicated on the spectral gloom. If Dore was concerned to depict the grotesque effect of Londons fogs on the lungs of its people, Whistler and Monet were more interested in its aesthetic properties. Monet was intrigued by the way fog transformed light and colour, and in his London river paintings he uses broken masses of colour to create smudged surfaces and blurred outlines which give the canvas its layered painterly texture and organize the composition. No wonder he was on record as saying that what he adored

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most about London was the fog, since in his eyes it made the city look ever more like one of his own impressionist paintings: Nature imitating art imitating the environment. In contrast, Whistlers etchings of the Thames (the famous nocturne series) tried to made dockland look not picturesque but sublime; using a range of diffused tints to envelop each scene, he paints the river as if it were the further shore of some industrial Byzantium, so effectively vaporising the squalor which Dore invested with such fine graphic detail. The indeterminacy of form, the uncanny reversals of figure and ground which fog gives to a landscape, was for Whistler, as for many urban Romantic poets, an incitement to imagine another worldthe Isle of Dogs as the Isle of Doges. As Whistler put it in his diary: And when the evening most clothes the riverside with poetry as with a veil and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanili and the warehouses were palaces in the night and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairy land is before us. Elisabeth Browning (see quote above) castigates the city poets for their moral passivity in the face of urban degradation and the all too easy victories achieved by their aesthetic resolution of it into a metropolitan sublime; but the kind of subtle alchemy wrought by dusk or the painterly palette, the cosmetic makeover achieved by fog, the consoling melancholy of ruins, these devices of imaginative transformation offered a powerful symbolic substitute for the kinds of material change associated with social and political strugglestruggles in which, I have argued, the bohemian subculture inhabited by painters and writers had little real interest or stake.

The apocalyptic vision of the capitals ruin had one further resource: its cemeteries. Cities of the dead, abandoned cities where only the undead roam, generalised the topos of the gothic novel to the modern urban condition. Eliots vision of office worker-zombies streaming across London Bridge (so many, I had not thought death had undone so many) feeds upon a vein of poetic imagery that, as we have seen, has a long provenance. But in giving urban gothic a characteristically modern twist, he points it in a direction whose more radical implications he is temperamentally, and ideologically, reluctant to pursue. For Necropolis is where the power of living labour gives way to dead labour, and where the Holy Church of Capital gets finally to rule OK. London had always relied on a large reserve army of labour to service its economy, many of them East End immigrants. But one effect of the rising organic composition of capital in the drive for profit was to replace the combinatory powers of labour with new technologies as the key driver of productivity and growth. The long, uneven (and never fully completed) transition from small workshop production to the Fordist machine age meant that dead labour (the value of labour power embodied in machines) rather than living labour (the trade skills of manual workers) was now widely regarded as the animating force of Londons economic vitality.
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In consequence a growing population of casual or intermittent workers, whose mobility was governed by both seasonal and cyclical fluctuations in demand was added to the ranks of the urban underclass, as were the hidden hands who serviced the new metropolitan consumer culture. The ratio of ghosts in the machinethose whom dead labour had undoneto those who continued to embody the meaning of work as the living creation of value, shifted decisively in favour of zombiedom. In the age of machinofacture, the bodily metaphors which had hitherto describedand naturalisedthe process of Londons de and re/generation were in any case being made increasingly redundant. In their place mechanistic metaphors of reproductionof function and dysfunction modelled the citys spatial divisions of labour as the basis for organising them into distinctive zones of regulation. Those places, populations and practices which fell through the rationalising grid found themselves confined to a new form of urban liminalitya twilight zone in the interstices of metropolitan modernity, where they morphed easily into figures of an existing gothic landscape. The vast cemeteries that were built to provide a last resting place for Londons growing population were often built in the East, where land was cheap and, just as important unfitted for any other purpose. This necropolis was Victorian Londons edge city drawing around itself a whole nexus of social, cultural and economic activity; in the twentieth century, as the city sprawled ever further eastwards into the Essex marshlands turning them into the suburban bad lands of Chingford, Romford, and Dagenham, the romantic ruinologists used the movement of both the living and the dead to good effect to create a whole new space of representation for the urban uncanny.

Marshes had long been a part of the gothic vocabularythe home of pestilential fogs, and solitary rumination, belonging neither to land nor sea, but where these elements enter into their most intimate dialogue. The vast muddy indistinction of sky, water and shore that is the Thames Estuary was host to a endless speculations about the porousness or permeability of the nations boundariesas well as to doubts about the loyalties and residential status of those who lived there. Cockneys kids might be happy as mud larks playing on the holiday beaches of Canvey, but anyone quite so at home in the tidal ooze was at the very least an anthropological curiosity, and not to be regarded as a fully-fledged member of the island race unless otherwise specified. For the ruinologist the very indeterminacy of the marshy habitat provided an ideal setting for the telling of cautionary tales about the transience of human existence and/or the vanity of the grandiose monuments to Industry and Empire which now dominated the capitals skyline. In After London, Richard Jeffries draws on one of the original uses of the gothic ruin, as a site for contemplating the triumph of nature over the follies of man to paint a powerful picture of this
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new Babylon, a megalopolis strangled by its own monstrously destructive forces of production and reverting to the organic vegetative condition of marshland. Mud, slime and ooze become the symptomatic medium of destruction, carrying the trace elements of the ruined civilisation to a watery grave. When the wind collects the miasma and as it were presses it together it becomes visible as a low cloud which hangs over the place. They say the sun is sometimes hidden when the vapour is thickestit is plain there are no fishes in the water all the rottenness of a thousand years is there festering under the water. Vast marshes now cover the site of ancient London; through there is no doubt that in the days of old there flowed the River Thames. The river had become partially choked from the cloaca of the ancient city which poured into it through enormous subterranean aqueducts and drains... When this had been going on for some time the river unable to find a channel began to overflow into the deserted streets and especially to fill the underground passages and drains of which the number and extent was beyond all power of words to describe. The waters underneath built up and burst in, the houses fell in and the huge metropolis was overthrown. All those parts which were built on low ground are become marches and swamps. There was nothing visible but trees and hawthorns on the upper lands, willows reeds and rushes on the lower. These crumbling ruins still more choked the river and almost but not quite turned it backthere is no channel through to the salt oceanit is a vast stagnant swamp which no man dare enter since death would be his inevitable fate. The theme of the deluge clearly links to contemporary anxieties created by the great public worksand in particular the renewal of the sewers taking place in London at this time. The metaphor of flood is also closely associated to the fear of uncontrolled flow of populations, just as the crumbling tenement is used to evoke the dissolution of Empire from within. This whole network of associations stabilised a certain apocalyptic vision of Londons future as its long imperial and industrial decline gathered pace. But then history intervened to produce a ruination whose catastrophic scope and scale created a new and more dreadful city of the dead beyond the wildest nightmares of the Anglo-gothic imagination. And then came the Blitz A generation that had gone to school of a horse drawn streetcar now stood under the sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and beneath those clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny fragile human body. Walter Benjamin Blitzkrieg has come to London in all its fury and brutality and filth.. Death drops from the skies. It falls on the just and the unjust. It strikes against the weak, the humble, the unoffending. Fire, ruin, explosion, murder stalk through our streets and work their will, not without impediment, but without any single restraint which humanity normally imposes on the devilry of man... How can human frames parry such b lows of metal? How can human brains withstand such endless pounding? The mighty machine rattles on and obliterates flesh and blood in its giant cogs and pincers Something flowers among the ruins, something so fine and noble that not all the powers of hell can destroy itthe courage of our people. London Evening Standard editorial, September 1940 The world of the blitz was a world in which the everyday and the unthinkable existed side by side with the two continuing changing place. To those living through the Blitz it often seemed as if life
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was divided by the clock, factory, office or domestic routine by dayhell and devastation let loose when darkness fell. The courage of so called ordinary people was shown by the way they passed from one world to the other without breaking down or cracking up. Charles Madge If Wrens most beautiful churches and some of the Cities most noble and historic buildings are damaged irreparably they have taken with them in their passing some of the dreariest and meanest stretches of Victorian office building. The hun is giving us a priceless opportunity to reconceive the city on a more rational and liveable plan McDonald Hastings, London Calling, December 1940 The advent of aerial warfare, and in particular the bombardment of cities from the air, was perhaps the single greatest instigator of twentieth-century urbanism. Since Booths great Survey of London Life and Labour, the search for panoptic strategies of urban planning and governance aimed to create standpoints from which it was possible not only to map the citys physical geography street by street, but to comprehend its social patterns and economic prospects as a meaningful whole. It was never going to be easy to connect the local ethnographies produced by the urban explorers to a wider framework of conceptual and political control; the very complexity and scale of the territory also resisted assimilation to some omniscient, all embracing mental map. But this project, which some think is nothing but that of modernity itself, also has its other scene, its own gothic tale of shock and awe to impart. Once the scope of the birds eye view narrows to that of a bombers gun sight, once whole neighbourhoods can be devastated, and their populations all but annihilated in a single bombing mission, the creation of a rational urban grid through the imposition of zoning regulations does no more than provide a template for the more efficient application of terror from the sky. Moreover once the explosive power and accuracy of the bomb makes total destruction of the target possible, all that is left behind to mark the moment of impact may be a heap of rubble and dust. Carpet-bombing destroys the ruin. The ruin works its metonymic magic by evoking the complete edifice of which it was once a part. Its role in the urban fabric is to celebrate the triumphant survival of form over the annihilation of function. But once reduced to formless rubble, the scene of devastation can no longer function as a lieu de memoire. It signifies only the obliteration of all distinction between the human world and inorganic waste, an objective correlate of the state of numb no-thingness which overwhelms the sense of loss in cases of post-traumatic stress. The blitzing of London, and in particular the docks, was the single most traumatic event on the home front during the Second World War. Not because it was unexpected, or even because of the extent of damage and suffering it caused but because it upset the official calculus of risk and its geographical coding. The main target of German carpet-bombing was not the heavily protected centres of wealth and power in the West End, but the dense concentration of working class population adjacent to main industrial arteries of trade and commerce clustered around the docks. The Thames Estuary lived up to its reputation for letting the enemy in through the back door by providing a clearly visible fix for German pilots to navigate by on their way in to bomb the docks. Fog however changed sides; no longer a treacherous dissembler of appearances, it provided a comfort blanket protecting people whose faith in bomb shelters, let along barrage balloons and anti-aircraft batteries was quickly dispelled by the Blitz. But nature could not be relied upon

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either, and when the skies cleared, the fog was replaced by the smoke and flames of the burning docks.

The second Great Fire of London posed as great a challenge to the resolution of the war artist as it did to be the fire fighter, the air raid warden and the Dockers themselves. And they responded in a remarkably similar wayby carrying on as usual, by denying the full impact of the horror, and yet, at the same time being awestruck by the scale of the devastation all around. As far as English war artists were concerned business as usual meant trying to assimilate the landscapes of the Blitz to the pictorial conventions of the gothic ruin or the picturesque landscape as a way of asserting a sense of historical continuity with the nations cultural heritage. The National Gallery may have been bombed but the aesthetic code of Turner and Constable, many of whose paintings it housed, was indestructiblethat was the message. Kenneth Clarke, the doyen of English art critics indeed described the bombing of the East End as Picturesque. His protg John Piper painted the remnants of Coventry Cathedral as if it were a replica of Tintern Abbey; his sketches of blitzed East End houses would not look out of place next to Constables Hadleigh Castle.

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In contrast the blitz landscapes painted by his contemporary Graham Sutherland explored the register of the sublime. His Devastation Series shows the twisted girders of bombed buildings transformed into writhing organic forms as if to celebrate natures final redemption of the terrible damage inflicted on the world by the hand of man.

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War photographers adopted similar conventions in their artfully composed images of the Blitz. The famous photograph of St Pauls standing defiantly alone and undefeated amidst a sea of flames, offers a view of the Cathedrals place in the national imaginary which is in a direct line of descent from William Blakes vision of Los. Through the prismatic lens of romantic ruinology it was thus possible to see the war torn city in terms of a familiar Anglo-gothic mise en scene and hence provide a link with its past. H. V Morton noted at the time by an ironic twist of History, the destruction of war has created ancient ruins which dead generations could only see in dreams. In this view the night terrors of the Blitz, these furnaces of afflication which Charles Madge and his colleagues at Mass Observation reported as part of the diurnal rhythm of Londoners lives was, at a deeper level, nothing but the recurrent nightmare of a history from which there was no awakening except through the uncanny realisation of Desolations dj vu. However most observers of the Blitz, then and now, have settled for less complicated ways of exploiting its aesthetic possibilities; the aim has been to convey impressionistically enough, the shock and the awe evoked by the spectacle of massive incendiary and cluster bombing. In order to render what might otherwise be unpalatable to the reader into a palette of pleasurable sense impressions, it was enough to paint a word picture after Monet and Whistler with a nod or two at the penny dreadful. Consider this piece of purple prose penned at the time by Mrs Gwendolyn Cox viewing the blitzing of the docks from the safe prospect of her flat in Cholmley Gardens Hampstead: It was a dark and moonless night, volumes of rose pink smoke and many coloured flashes from explosions pierced again and again the blood red cloud which, brooding and angry hung over the city. Fifty years later David Johnstone in the City Ablaze recreates the scene like this: A rainbow of shades some almost delicately radiant transfixed onlookers, deep crimson flecked with scarlet, blue tinted with yellowy green. Vermilion edged with orange and goldall tossing in the north easterly gale. Each district was floodlit by its own distinct tincture. Everything seemed grotesque and unearthlythe overall effect was another worldly nightmare, a carnival night in hell. He cannot, unfortunately, resist recruiting other people, supposedly there at the time to bear witness to his prosaic flights of gothic fancy: To 15 year old Dorothy Haring the whole scene was like a dream, the fire and the smoke, the noise of the fire pumps and anti-aircraft guns seemed too loud to be real. More than one fireman staring out at the daylight brilliant wall of flame suffered a sensory breakdown, some were literally
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hypnotised, and others experienced mild hallucinations seeing weird forms and unreal faces in the windblown fires. Even other firemen when seen in that light looked like strange creatures from another world. In contrast the Evening Standard Editorial ( see quote above) grounds its immediate response to the Blitz in the theme first enunciated by Walter Benjamin twenty years before, of the frailty of the human form pitted against the monstrous new war machine. Mervyn Peake, the future author of the first great post war gothic novel Gormenghast also reinstates the body as a measure of the citys pain, imagining Blitzed London as ravaged women: Half masonry, half pain: her head From which the plaster breaks away Like flesh from the rough bone, is turned Upon a neck of stones; her eyes Are lidless windows of smashed glass, Each star shaped pupil Giving upon a vault so vast How can the head contain it? Shapes and Sounds, 1941 This re-inscription of the organic metaphor as a central unifying image of community, nation and state runs like a red white and blue thread through war time propaganda narratives. Divested of terror laded imagery, this appeal to the body politic could evoke magical powers of reparation capable of assimilating the traumatic experience of the Blitz to a quasi-natural cycle of urban decay and renewal, which in turn is seen to be integral to a thriving city. The war ruin is thus integrated into the harmonising compositional structures of the landscape picturesque: just another tumbledown building overgrown with ivy. This is the burden of Eliots response to the Blitz in East Coker: In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by pass Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires Houses live and die: there is a time for building And a time for living and for generation In fact his raid on the inarticulate discovers a principle of eternal recurrence in Londons wartime travails which owes more to the cosmology of Eastern religions than to any Western spiritual or aesthetic discipline. Nevertheless it was to furnish a decidedly profane principle of hope for post war reconstruction. It was a short step from accepting the air raids as part of a higher purpose, to seeing them as a godsend to all those who wanted to rebuild London according to a more rational plan. The view that Hitlers bombers were clearing the East End of its slums more cheaply and efficiently than any municipal bulldozer was first enunciated by MacDonald Hastings in his famous war time broadcast on the theme (see quote above). Even if the planners at the LCC who were put in charge of Londons post war reconstruction did not dare to publicly voice such sentiments, it is clear from their memoirs that privately they more or less shared this view.
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The Abercrombie Report published in 1943 was the first attempt at a comprehensive master plan for the whole of London. Perhaps its most significant feature was that it abandoned the piecemeal development which had hitherto characterised Londons growth and went back to Ebenezer Howards model of organic growth onto which it attempted to graft a functionalist grid. The result was to turn London into a distributed series of self-contained improvement zones, little islands of urban redevelopmentan unconscious mapping perhaps of the stand-alone island story so central to Britains wartime image of itself, onto its post war urban geography. The clearing of the bomb sites not only deprived the blitz kids of their favourite haunts, it put an end, for the moment, to the gothic revival. As Rose Macauley put it, the British have had enough of German ruin lust to last several life times. But not everyone was happy with the result. John Betjeman, the poet laureate of late Victorian Gothic, especially in so far as it had influenced the vernacular architecture of Londons middle class suburbs, saw in the new developments nothing but an act of vandalism which was completing the destruction already wrought on the capital by the Luftwaffe. As in his famously vitriolic poem about Slough: Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough It isnt fit for humans now, There isnt grass to graze a cow Swarm over, Death! Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens Those air-conditioned, bright canteens, Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans Tinned minds, tinned breath. Mess up the mess they call a town A house for ninety-seven down And once a week for half-a-crown For twenty years. The new public housing estates, both low and high rise, brought the principles of modernist design to bear for the first time on everyday working class life on a large scale. The application of Parker Morris standards ensured that for the inhabitants of these new model dwellings indoors offered as much space for relaxed conviviality as out, in addition to providing a new locale for leisure pursuits, TV and, of course, D-I-Y. In the East End the streets were increasingly abandoned to children and the territorial rivalries of male gangs. There was little room in the new urban order for the kind of spectral geography which had made The Smoke with its holes and corners hidden from the honest and the well to do (Mayhew) such a popular haunt of the uncanny, not to mention the down and out. The post Clean Air Act finally killed off the pea soup fogs, leaving the blackened faces of Londons public buildings and monuments to be given a wash and brush up by municipal cleansing departments. Yet even if the material signs of war damage could be removed, or built over, the memory traces left by the Blitz, the hidden wounds of war could not be so easily erased. Disavowal always leaves space for re-inscription.

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One of the more interesting examples of this was in the design for Peterleea new town built in the heart of the Durham coal fields, as the North Easts answer to Milton Keynes. On the design consultants for this project was Victor Pasmore. He started out as a lyrical landscape painter but evolved into Englands foremost abstract painter, who applied the same formal compositional principles of what he called synthetic constructionism to the the layout of houses and roads in the south western quadrant of the town. Indeed from the air the flat roofs and prefabricated timber panels look exactly like one of his paintings; similarly the orthogonal blocks and painted black lines of his reliefs are modelled in the pedestrian routes which cut through the housing blocks. The centrepiece of the whole designan abstract concrete bridge over a lakenow known as the Pasmore Pavilionwas described by him in the following terms: an architecture and sculpture through which to walk, in which to linger and play, which can lift the activity and psychology of an urban housing community onto a universal plane.

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Pasmore explicitly saw town planning and abstract art as equivalent instances of a modernist aesthetic which rejected the pictorial conventions that had hitherto dominated English landscape paintingincluding much of its war time art. There was nothing picturesque or sublime about Pasmores workit invoked a cool, hard edged, architectonic form of spatialitya kind of abstract impressionism in that it sought to give formal precision to the otherwise chaotic sensorium of environmental perception. Interestingly enough, even before his Peterlee adventure, much of Pasmores work looked compositionally very like a plan view of the bunkers, emplacements and other military installations which British and German architects, inspired by Bauhaus principles, had built to defend the coasts of their respective countries from invasion during the war. This may be coincidencea family resemblance between different instances of the same Bauhaus aesthetic. But this project may also bear the unconscious imprint of the trauma induced by the destruction of the ruin as a place where loss could be mourned. For here was an art that celebrated the indestructability of pure form, its ability to distil from the detritus of everyday life a universal sensibility of an enduring beauty than no bomb could destroy. As if to say: we can design and build new towns and cities that can never again be reduced to rubbleor even ruin, that are vandal proof and will survive everything that history can throw at them. In fact the history of Peterlee, and in particular the Pasmore Pavilion, was to prove quite otherwise. Over the years the radical rooftop and brickwork designs have been all but been effaced by their D-I-Y conversion into a more vernacular styleall pitched roofs and PVC windows. If people from the housing estates did linger and play in his Pavilion it was not to ascend to the universal but to mark the structure with the particularisms of their presence. The building quickly became a public canvas for graffiti, and a meeting place for local gangs of disaffected youth; its
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condition has deteriorated to the point where local residents have begun to press for its demolition as an eyesore. So what if these post war New Jerusalem were to harbour, in the very sterility of their conception, the seeds of their own undoing, the return of the traumatic conflicts they had repressed? How far would this upset the confident geometry of the post war settlement between capital and labour? Would it create the conditions for an alternative way of implementing Blakes Vision of Los? And if so who are to be the keepers of the new ruins of modernity? In the second part of this study, to be published in the next issue of Rising East On Line, I will consider how a significant body of work produced by a group of contemporary writers, painters and film makersincluding Iain Sinclair, Patrick Wright, Peter Akroyd, Patrick Keiller, Jock McFadyen and John Virtuestruggles with these questions as it seeks renew the Anglo-gothic imagination and its capacity to address what is at stake in Londons eastwards turn. Acknowledgement The author would like to thank the staff at the Borough Archive of Peterlee for their help with the picture research related to Victor Pasmore and for permission to reproduce the related visual material. Select Bibliography Readers who want to explore some of the issues raised in this article in greater depth might like to consult the following: Peter Akroyd London a biography (London 2000) John Barrel The Infections of Thomas de Quincey (London 1991) Christine Boyer The City and collective memory (Cambridge 1996) Paul Brimicombe The Big Smoke (London 1987) Gesualdo Bufalino The Keeper of ruins (London 1994) Glenis Byron and David Punter Spectral readingstowards a gothic geography (London 2002) Kenneth Clarke The Gothic Revivalan essay in the history of taste (London 1962) Alain Corbin The Foul and the Fragrant (leamington 1986) Deborah Epstein Walking the Victorian Streets (London1995) Robert Ginsberg The Aesthetic of ruin (Oxford 2004) G Stedman Jones Outcast London (Oxford 1971) Anne Janowitz Englands ruins (Oxford 1990) Patrick Keillor Robinson in Space (London 1999) Marek Kohn Dope Girls (London 1992) Seth Koven Slumming (London 2004) (London 2001) Eric de Mare Victorian London revealed (London 2001) Alan Mayne The Imagined Slum (Leicester 1993) Thomas MacFarland Romanticism and the form of ruin (Oxford 1998) Michael Moorcock Mother London (London 1988)
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Linda Nead Victorian Babylon (New Haven 2000) Shaun OBoyle Modern Ruinsphotographic essays http: //oboylephoto. com Susana Orega and John Stotesbury London in Literaturevisionary mappings of the metropolis (Heidelberg 2002) Ian Sinclair Lights out for the Territory(London 1997) Tate Modern Turner, Whistler Monet catalogue (especially the essay by Jonathon Ribner) (London 2005) Anthony Vidler The Architectural uncanny (Massachusetts 1996) Judith Walkovitz City of Dreadful delight (London 1992) Patrick Wright Journey through the Ruins (London 1991) Alexandra Warwick Lost cities: Londons Apocalypse London 2001) Paul Zucke The Fascination of Decay (London 1968)

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