The ‘Big City’ exhibition at the City of London’s Guildhall Art Gallery is precisely that: the paintings are big in size like the city they describe, the unique ‘Great Wen’ (the disparaging term coined for London by William Cobbett and signifying a sebaceous cyst).
Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present times the paintings are not only a visual feast but are also a valuable documentation of London’s ritual significance, its ever-changing appearance and evolving skyline.
The view from Greenwich Hill shows the then newly built Queen’s House in the sylvan setting of the Royal park. Built by Inigo Jones, who had just returned from an apprenticeship spent in Italy (where he designed Livorno’s cathedral), it is England’s first renaissance palace and sets the seal on the city as one gifted by many open spaces.
The Queen’s house must have looked strange in London’s essentially mediaeval and Tudor architectural setting Much of the largely timber-framed housing was burnt to cinders in the Great Fire of 1666. This contemporary Dutch painting shows the dramatic scene of a city in flames, an event which would not be repeated until the Blitz of the Second World War.
The Great Fire gave Sir Christopher Wren a chance to rebuilt his city in a new classical style. The churches he designed and his greatest monument, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, are certainly Italianate. However, the architect’s project to re-plan the city with straight avenues and squares, according to Alberti’s idea of the ideal city, fell flat when landholders’ right to hold firm to their property prevented the daring plan from being achieved. So today we have in the City magnificent buildings without proper vistas, obscured facades, churches built ingeniously to fit awkward sites and, until recent road implementations and population dispersal to the suburbs, an overcrowded and traffic-choked place.
What, however, would today strike an inhabitant of Wren’s London is the change in the City’s skyline. The spires and domes of a previous century so lovingly depicted in Canaletto’s portrait of London have today been suffocated by a surfeit of skyscrapers and high-rise. Saint Paul’s dome struggles to make its mark among the contemporary megaliths of banking and commerce and the spires of the churches have to be picked out against mammoth blocks.
After the damage caused by London’s second great fire, the incessant bombing it had to suffer during the last war, a concerted effort was made to clear the city’s slums and redevelop areas like the deprived East End. Echoing contemporary architecture of Le Corbusier and continental apartment living, high rises appeared in London’s housing estates. Brick gave way to reinforced concrete and ‘high’ ideas entered planners’ heads. These flats were to be a model for future living in London. They would offer hygienic conditions, facilities and room for a population which had rarely had a bathroom.
Unfortunately the ideals fell short of the reality. Blocks of flats might have worked in European cities like Berlin and Milan where there was an existing tradition of apartment living. However, in a country used to terraced housing and semi-detached dwellings it failed to work. The absence of proper concierges, the degradation caused by a combination of concrete rot, vandalism, lack of community centres and drug abuse soon turned the ideal city into the infernal city.
This painting shows the contrast between the new monsters and traditional terraced housing.
Regrettably much which have been refurbished was senselessly demolished to make way for what had by now become a dystopia.
The corner vignette of a characteristic Italian mediaeval hill town in the above painting is a cunning aside perhaps commenting on what truly represents a living community and what doesn’t.
Does all this mean the end of the high rise? Not at all. High rises are back in London in the guise of ‘executive apartments’. The decline of traditional families and the rise of young individual ‘yuppies’ has created a demand for more living units. New flats appear to have learnt from the mistakes of their predecessors and London is again changing its skyline with a rising generation of perhaps friendlier monsters.
Unlike many other world cities London is an ‘organic’ organisation Few grand processional avenues exist here and few monumental complexes have their place. True, London does have its Mall and Greenwich has a magnificent set of regal buildings but the character of this city is to be found in its multiplicity of terraced streets and semi-detached avenues.
It would be difficult to restore London’s Renaissance skyline where the dome of Saint Paul’s dominated. However, the city is now acclaimed for being one of the greenest in the world. Indeed, the amount of open space contained within its conurbation has earned it the title of ‘Garden City’.
Moreover, the ability of so many different communities and ethnic groups to live side by side with each other in largely mutual respect and avoiding the terrible conflicts which afflict so many other places in the world has created a new ideal city in London. ‘Ideal’ here is not overwhelmingly neoclassical architecture or low-rise such as one finds in Rome’s centre. It is not a wonderful climate or supreme architecture. Nor is it fast communications or an abundance of fly-overs. It is simply the ability of a city to hold together an incredibly varied population with amazingly different cultures, who speak over three hundred different languages, who come from such varied backgrounds. How this is achieved must remain one of the great miracles and secrets of this astonishing city which is so envied by many of the world’s other great conurbations.
As the paintings in this exhibition so ably depict London is indeed ‘The Big City’ in the fullest sense of the word ‘Big’.
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