Comments on: A vision of post-apocalypse Britain?

A vision of post-apocalypse Britain?

infini — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:07:49 -0800

Eerie computer-generated images reveal how UK landmarks could crumble and decay if humanity was wiped out. Gallery

By: mazola

mazola — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:13:53 -0800

... or if you cut funding to infrastructure.

By: cjorgensen

cjorgensen — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:14:15 -0800

Or you could just implement austerity measures for the same effect (and keep the people).

By: DU

DU — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:17:46 -0800

Why are all the image pairs backwards? This reads like a story of urban renewal.

By: dowcrag

dowcrag — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:19:18 -0800

Or you could just implement austerity measures for the same effect You beat me to it.

By: agregoli

agregoli — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:23:23 -0800

*If* humanity is wiped out? It will be, eventually. Awesome link, thanks!

By: QueerAngel28

QueerAngel28 — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:24:44 -0800

I love shit like this. More decayed crumbling old things, and far less people. Do America next.

By: Kitteh

Kitteh — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:27:25 -0800

Is this what Daily Fail readers see in their heads all the time? Only you know, caused by the gays/the immigrants/the "immoral" pop stars?

By: Ravneson

Ravneson — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:28:05 -0800

Ahhh, dystopian speculation always hits the sweet spot for me (although I'm a little sceptical to there being smoke emitted from the power smokestacks, then again, it could be one of those yummy "the rats have inherited the earth" scenarios..). Also, London Futures is an artistic endeavour in a similar vein with a focus on climatic calamities rather than post-human decay.

By: Frowner

Frowner — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:29:37 -0800

Is this what Daily Fail readers see in their heads all the time? Only you know, caused by the gays/the immigrants/the "immoral" pop stars? I was thinking of it more as a yearning for ruins - a yearning for apocalypse. It's as though no one can see any end to the crisis [or to neoliberal capitalism] except through pandemic and catastrophe, and so the only way to get beyond our present untenable situation is to imagine a time when Nature Itself has laid low the structures of power and wealth. We can't do it - so it's going to have to be pandemic flu or poisonous fungus or whatever.

By: monkey closet

monkey closet — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:29:48 -0800

I live in the New Forest. It's nice to know that, after the apocalypse, the rest of you will have roads as bad as ours.

By: elizardbits

elizardbits — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:30:20 -0800

I'm a little sceptical to there being smoke emitted from the power smokestacks The first ruin with the satellite dish also seems somewhat illogical.

By: srboisvert

srboisvert — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:31:50 -0800

These are clearly done by people who have never gardened or worked for national rail. Within about 5 years everything would be covered in buddleia. Everything.

By: sonascope

sonascope — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:33:34 -0800

I think I've developed a real fatigue for our seemingly interminable rush to produce even grimmer renditions of the sci-fi apornolyptic spectacles of the seventies. What does it say about us that all we can imagine are dystopian futures that suit our tweezy flagellant fetishes? It's funny how the pestilential futures we all thought were just around the corner in 1973 never appeared. Maybe it's just something that we, as descendants of puritanical mortification freaks (at least in the US) just wish would happen because we're all just so very dirty and naughty. Call me a Pollyanna if you like, but I think I'll reread Ecotopia this month.

By: chavenet

chavenet — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:33:59 -0800

Reminds me of Joseph Gandy

By: swift

swift — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:34:24 -0800

If you like this sort of thing you should really check out The World Without Us. Also, buildings don't just crumble, they completely collapse if not maintained.

By: selfnoise

selfnoise — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:36:35 -0800

Is this what Daily Fail readers see in their heads all the time? Only you know, caused by the gays/the immigrants/the "immoral" pop stars? I was thinking of it more as a yearning for ruins - a yearning for apocalypse. It's as though no one can see any end to the crisis [or to neoliberal capitalism] except through pandemic and catastrophe, and so the only way to get beyond our present untenable situation is to imagine a time when Nature Itself has laid low the structures of power and wealth. We can't do it - so it's going to have to be pandemic flu or poisonous fungus or whatever. I agree that part of the appeal is a feeling of helplessness, but I think it's also a feeling of dissatisfaction with the present world that people find really hard to articulate or face. Here we are at the height of our civilization! And it just isn't making us feel all that much happier.

By: Jehan

Jehan — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:38:41 -0800

"What would Battersea Power Station look like were it a ruin?" Um, Battersea Power Station.

By: The Underpants Monster

The Underpants Monster — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:40:34 -0800

If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere!

By: Kid Charlemagne

Kid Charlemagne — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:43:36 -0800

Is it wrong that I immediately started scanning some of these looking for raiders, feral ghouls and super mutants?

By: davebush

davebush — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:43:43 -0800

The alternate universe Battersea Power Station.

By: winna

winna — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:46:23 -0800

the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets a cry of seabirds high over in empty eternity

By: emmtee

emmtee — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:12:58 -0800

tags: somehowconnectedtoplaystation notsurehow It's marketing for The Last of Us, which is set in the post-fungal-apocalypse world pictured, albeit (as far as I know) wholly in the US. Apparently it's p great.

By: Mister_A

Mister_A — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:13:48 -0800

What's this? It's beautiful! EDIT: Nvm I see now the labels for the pictures.

By: COBRA!

COBRA! — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:23:38 -0800

Every time I see stuff like this, I think of Hitler and Speer obsessing over ruin value.

By: bunglin jones

bunglin jones — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:30:55 -0800

Wow. I like these. They strike me as what might happen if a really, really good police sketch artist was listening to Morrissey's Greatest Hits.

By: 2N2222

2N2222 — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:31:05 -0800

Why was Battersea billowing out so much smoke? The mutants firing it up?

By: agregoli

agregoli — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:52:14 -0800

I think its natural to imagine the end. We all know it will happen, but but don't know how. But I do agree there's an underlying yearning for Nature to fix things we feel we can't fix.

By: selfnoise

selfnoise — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:54:10 -0800

I'm a little sceptical to there being smoke emitted from the power smokestacks The first ruin with the satellite dish also seems somewhat illogical. In general they exhibit an incoherence which seems to be common to these sorts of visions. Everything has been dead for a long time, AND everything is currently dying! Melancholy + Danger = Money.

By: yoink

yoink — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:10:33 -0800

I was thinking of it more as a yearning for ruins - a yearning for apocalypse. It's as though no one can see any end to the crisis [or to neoliberal capitalism] except through pandemic and catastrophe, and so the only way to get beyond our present untenable situation is to imagine a time when Nature Itself has laid low the structures of power and wealth. We can't do it - so it's going to have to be pandemic flu or poisonous fungus or whatever. Hmmm. I think one needs to be cautious about reading the appeal of images like this as being all that specifically tied to a particular moment of "crisis" or a particular phase of late capitalism or what have you. After all, there was a huge vogue for these kinds of images in the C18th (London in ruins, Paris in ruins etc. etc.).

By: pengale

pengale — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:28:05 -0800

Apparently if there were no more humans, the weather would be stormier and plants in general would be a darker color.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:42:29 -0800

I thought these illustrations from the forthcoming Conservative manifesto were embargoed until two weeks before the elections.

By: Zack_Replica

Zack_Replica — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:22:51 -0800

Looking at the pictures I thought... was anyone else searching for covered points of entry and snipers, or have I just played WAY the hell too much Fallout?

By: Ravneson

Ravneson — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:26:09 -0800

Although I do love the word apornolyptic and can easily agree with the current pop-cultural fad of relishing in it all is a bit much, there may be actually be a certain productive function to the whole exercise.

By: TheWhiteSkull

TheWhiteSkull — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:29:46 -0800

Is this what Daily Fail readers see in their heads all the time? Only you know, caused by the gays/the immigrants/the "immoral" pop stars? I was thinking of it more as a yearning for ruins - a yearning for apocalypse. I think for a particular set of those readers, its also a feeling that when the apocalypse comes, "I'll finally be able to shoot the people I don't like." It's sort of the grown-up nutter version of "Oh boy- sleep! That's where I'm a Viking!"

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:41:29 -0800

Kitteh: "Is this what Daily Fail readers see in their heads all the time? Only you know, caused by the gays/the immigrants/the "immoral" pop stars?" Second comment on the article: "When our imported guests have finally bled this country to death this is what we will be left with."

By: sgt.serenity

sgt.serenity — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:52:42 -0800

Glasgow itself looks like an ominous, warlike place; looming large behind the famous Arc, mysterious fires can be seen emanating from the city, its suburbs filled with decaying tower blocks and grim industrial works. Tha's pretty much what i like about Glasgow though.....in another note, do cheerful post apocalyptic images exist anywhere ?

By: mcrandello

mcrandello — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:29:47 -0800

Pic 5 just screams for an enormous deflated pigballoon on one of the smokestacks.

By: arcticseal

arcticseal — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 21:37:28 -0800

Looks nice and quiet. Perhaps too quiet.

By: Frowner

Frowner — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 06:36:07 -0800

Hmmm. I think one needs to be cautious about reading the appeal of images like this as being all that specifically tied to a particular moment of "crisis" or a particular phase of late capitalism or what have you. After all, there was a huge vogue for these kinds of images in the C18th (London in ruins, Paris in ruins etc. etc.). No, no - what you're suggesting is that we must have either no broader cultural explanation for the appeal of ruins or a transcultural/transtemporal*explanation of their appeal. It's perfectly possible to say that images of ruins mean different things at different times in response to different cultural concerns. Science fiction movies as a genre go into and out of popularity, but we don't need to allege that a fan of Cloverfield has the same set of anxieties and fascinations that a fifties Forbidden Planet viewer would. I think someone could write an awesome book about the history of Being Concerned With Ruins, though. Surely the 18thC stuff had to do with the emerging popularity of tourism and thus exposure to the Roman ruins in Italy, right? (I'm thinking of Goethe's Italian Journey here.) And then the new-ish Enlightenment understanding of history as no longer teleological/religious time but rather human/scientific time - that would be percolating out of scientific/philosophical circles into the mainstream. (The first two chapters of Peter Osborne's The Politics of Time - which are all that I have read so far - are interesting on this although that's not the point of the book.) And advancing historiographical and archaeological techniques, so that you have a more and more detailed set of ideas about the past. So all of the sudden, there's a popular understanding that the world is not just moving toward the End Times, it's moving...toward something? not toward something? and whoa, look at all these Roman ruins, a great empire fallen into decay. (The lone and level sands stretch far away, right?) What if some day London were like that? Or, god forbid, Paris? Are England and France as great as Rome? And of course, the scary/forbidden/transgressive frisson of imagining that all this great, impressive, giant stuff is ruined!! And then wouldn't Paris and London be growing fast at that point, and filthy, and full of a new urban class? Wouldn't there be a lot of anxieties about the very viability of cities? It seems likely that the allure of ruins has a lot to do with anxiety about the viability of a given way of life, but there can be a lot of other differences. *That's a Joanna Russ joke, for any nerds in the audience!

By: yoink

yoink — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 07:37:50 -0800

No, no - what you're suggesting is that we must have either no broader cultural explanation for the appeal of ruins or a transcultural/transtemporal*explanation of their appeal. How you get that from "I think one needs to be cautious" about facile historicizing arguments I truly cannot imagine. The problem with the kinds of interpretations you sketch in your comment is that they are entirely circular. "X cultural form was popular at time T. The things I know about time T are A, B, and C: therefore X cultural form was popular because it was a reflection of A, B, and C." You may be right that the C18th vogue for visions of great modern cities in ruins had to do with all the things you suggest. But the argument has no real explanatory power in itself at all. "The aliens are among us" stories from the 50s and 60s were always read as being allegories of the Cold War, but long after the Cold War ended such stories continue to fascinate us (think of the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. Clearly any purely reductive reading of those stories from the 50s and 60s that tries to see their appeal purely and solely as stemming from that particular historical context is missing something. That is not to say that people in the 50s and 60s did not use such stories, in part, to think about issues relating to the Cold War; but when we examine that we have to find specific and concrete instances of people doing so and think about the actual specific and concrete ways in which they did. Simply waving our hands airily at the general phenomenon of Cold War anxieties and at the air of paranoid suspicion that pervades such stories and saying "See?" tells us nothing at all. Similarly, to look at these photoshopped pictures of decaying structures and to wave ones hands airily at "late capitalism" or a prevailing mood of "ecological catastrophism" or what have you is equally vacuous. This is not to say that such images do not get motivated in certain circumstances by certain people as ways of addressing such issues but, again, that to explore how that happens requires the investigation of particular cases. Or, in other words, one needs to be cautious about reading the appeal of images like this as being all that specifically tied to a particular moment of "crisis"...

By: Frowner

Frowner — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 08:18:37 -0800

How you get that from "I think one needs to be cautious" about facile historicizing arguments I truly cannot imagine. Because "be cautious" is polite-academic for "you're doing it wrong, and probably foolishly". I don't know - I have always figured that comments on non-academic websites that I phrase as "I was thinking of it more as...." are pretty informal and tossing-ideas-around, but next time I'll be sure to add a disclaimer.

By: infini

infini — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 06:37:58 -0800

Abandoned America