An interesting compliment to an architect, but an article (PDF) in a new edition of the online French/English history journal Cercles explores how visitors to London in the 18th and 19th centuries assessed it architecture in this way. Rome had produced great ruins; would Britain’s stack up when it too inevitably lost its imperial grandeur?
So… “In 1800 Elizabeth Lady Holland recorded in her journal,
I have been reading Le Brun’s journey to Persepolis in 1704, the ruins of which (Persepolis) seem equal to anything in antiquity in point of solidity, size, and extent. In future times when this little island shall have fallen into its natural insignificancy, by being no longer possessed of a fictitious power founded upon commerce, distant colonies, and other artificial sources of wealth, how puzzled will the curious antiquary be when seeking amidst the ruins of London vestiges of its past grandeur? Acres now covered by high, thin walls of brick, making streets tirés à cordon, divided into miserable, straitened, scanty houses, will, when decayed, crumble into a vast heap of brick-dust. No proud arch to survive the records of history, no aqueduct to prove how much the public was considered by ye Governt., no lofty temples, no public works! St. Paul’s anywhere would be a grand edifice; finer as a ruin than in its present state, disfigured with casements, whitewashed walls, pews, etc. The bridges alone would strike the eye as fine remains; they are magnificent.
(More about Lady Holland, who was a major character of the city that she was contemplating.)
There’s also a piece on Flora Tristan’s view of London, PDF, in French. It concludes, in a rough translation, that in 1840:
“What she saw in London would not make it possible for anybody to affirm that Great Britain was a country where freedom had triumphed. Admittedly, there was a Parliament, but there was no representative of the working class, or any elected official of female sex. She met women with inadequate education, completely subject to their husband, prostitutes humiliated by the upper classes, and workmen who were victims of the indifference of their owners who treat their horses better, plus humiliated prisoners given no chance to redeem themselves.”
(There’s an English account of her here.)
About