After London

“For this marvellous city, of which such legends are related, was after all only of brick, and when the ivy grew over and trees and shrubs sprang up, and, lastly, the waters underneath burst in, this huge metropolis was soon overthrown.” After London, Chapter V, Richard Jefferies (1885)

London is defined by its landmarks – the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral, its many bridges, the Thames and, more recently, the gleaming towers of the financial district. These icons have long captivated artists such as Canaletto, Monet, Whistler, and Tissot, each seeking to capture the city’s shifting light and form in their work. In Charing Cross Bridge (1902), one of Monet’s many paintings of the Thames, pale veils of orange, blue, yellow and pearly white drift through morning mist, rendering the city at once present and dissolving, real and dreamlike.

This tension between solidity and evanescence finds a parallel in Richard Jefferies’ remarkable novel After London (1885), which imagines a mysterious natural catastrophe that drowns the city and plunges its people into a barbaric future. Jefferies depicts a “Wild England” reclaimed by nature, populated by devolved humans and strange new creatures. Of its time, yet uncannily modern, After London articulates Victorian anxieties about urbanisation, industry, climate and resource scarcity, and can be read as one of the first works of Anthropocene fiction, exploring the human impact on Earth’s climate.

The works gathered here are shaped by that same unease. Each portrays a faintly recognisable London scene yet is emptied of human presence – vistas suspended in a strange hush, where landmarks appear unstable, submerged, or already slipping back into the embrace of nature. The compositions are tranquil, their palettes subdued and atmospheric, yet beneath their surface lingers a quiet foreboding, as if the city were holding its breath. These are images of London, and yet not London.

In an age saturated with endlessly reproduced images of the capital – its skyline reduced to visual shorthand for Britain itself – this work seeks to resist cliché. As Walter Benjamin observed, repetition dilutes aura; here, instead, the city is refracted through dream and omen, a place dissolving even as it reveals itself. That the photographs are made entirely in camera, without recourse to artificial intelligence, feels significant in our moment of digital hallucination. They are records of a city poised between memory and imagination, between what has been and what might yet come.