Most artistic visions of London’s future have been darkly pessimistic. But this Underground poster painted by Montague B Black in 1926 offered an uncanny – and much more optimistic – view of the modern city

In 1926, London Underground published a poster painted by Montague B Black, a publicity artist who also created images for Liverpool’s White Star Line, which imagines London in 2026. A golden sky enfolds a cityscape of skyscrapers over which various types of flying machine hover.

We’ve more than a decade to go to fulfil its prophecies (still time for the dirigible to make a comeback), but Black’s vision of London in 2026 looks remarkably similar to a view across the City in 2015. His skyscrapers, inspired by the innovative American cities of his own day, look remarkably like the Walkie Talkie and other contemporary metropolitan monoliths.

Indeed, he did not picture anything quite as dramatic as the Shard. Maybe that’s because the Shard has an apocalyptic quality more reminiscent of science fiction dystopias than utopias. For apart from its futurological accuracy, the most striking thing about this 1926 Tube poster is its optimism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Front cover of Gustave Doré’s London: A Pilgrimage. Illustration: British Library

The vast majority of artistic visions of London’s future are darkly pessimistic. Artists have imagined the city in ruins, in flames, forgotten, abandoned. A pioneer of such urban sci-fi art was the Romantic architect Sir John Soane, who built the Bank of England. In 1830 Soane, who loved the melancholy ruins of Rome and their brooding depictions by Piranesi, commissioned the artist Joseph Gandy to depict his own architectural masterpiece as it might look far into the future: a colossal ruin.

Somehow, this way of seeing London’s future has a deep appeal. The French artist Gustave Doré also imagines the city’s ruinous destiny in his visual report on the city, London: A Pilgrimage, published in 1869.

The nightmare of London’s future continued to captivate artists in the 20th century, fuelled by the dread of air war and bombing raids that gripped Britain in the 1930s. In 1937 Walter Nessler painted Premonition, a vision of London after aerial bombardment. Nessler imagines the city as an inferno of fire, broken buildings and melting metal, with the dome of St Paul’s rising from the horror – juxtaposed with a gas mask.

Nessler’s powerful painting, which hangs at the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, has been hailed as a premonition of the Blitz and even of more recent terrorist attacks. It is nothing of the kind, of course. Nessler’s nightmare London embodies the widespread fear in the 1930s that cities would crumble and fall in the face of saturation bombing.

The same pessimism about London’s future was expressed as early as 1897 in The War of the Worlds, by HG Wells: in his apocalyptic fantasy, we are helpless to defend the capital from the Martians – until a mere virus fells them.

In the event, when London did come under futuristic attack in the Blitz, the city survived. Its future, after all, was not as bleak as artists loved to paint it. Remarkably, it is not the terrifying images of a doomed city conjured up by Doré and Nessler that have come true, but Montague Black’s cheerful 1926 poster.

Perhaps there is a moral. Cities may fill us all at times with dread and foreboding, but their power to survive and grow often makes utopian hopes a better bet.

