Where London Stood

I found a wonderful site about ruins called Where London Stood, which David Platt has assembled. It shows images of imagined ruins from the 18th century and onward. There are so many lovely images he collected that it's hard to know where to start. He has Modern Ruins, a comparison of Shelley and Smith's similar Ozymandias poems, beautiful renderings of a ruined America from John Ames Mitchell's The Last American, Paris in BBC's The Tripod, Philadelphia in Twelve Monkeys (note the lion on the roof), and Washington in Logan's Run. He also has an extensive bibliography.

Click on the links, enjoy the fruits of the imagination, and think about why ruins are so evocative.