The London Spectacle. Poetics and Politics of the Urban Space

Abstract. The image of the “Greater London”, capital of the Industrial Revolution, finds its visionary foundation in poetry, namely in William Wordsworth’s Prelude (1851). Foregrounded by the poet’s gaze (the verses devoted to the city- in the Book Seven- were completed by 1805), London emerges as a ‘spectacular city’, while a Victorian establishment was launching a urbanistic and architectural project to make London an “exhibition” to the multitude for the multitudes. The Imperial London was eventually made even more spectacular with the opening of collective and performing spaces that clearly embodied a ‘participant spectacular gaze’: according to a growing national ideology that reflected its power into a “progressive architecture”, conceived also to entertain, astonish and ‘control’ the urban masses. From the ‘astonished’ gaze of the proto-romantic flaneur to the Crystal Palace (the ‘wonderful’ glass structure that in 1851 hosted the first Great Exhibition), from the “pleasure gardens” to the grand glass and iron buildings conceived by the fin de siècle Victorian establishment, an impressive cultural and aesthetic discourse has constructed the image of London as the modern “City of Wonder” (competing with Paris, Chicago and New York, and in opposition to Rome, the Antique City). A ‘wonder’ that would soon become a global tourist attraction (“London. The Wonder City” was actually the title of a best selling tourist guide published in English in the beginning of the XXth century): a modern metropolis implemented by heritage attractions and ‘view points’ that are also gaze-devices for an urban community that has been investing emotions and money in making itself a world-show.