[00:01.420]At the end of the 18th century,
[00:03.620]poet and visionary William Blake,
[00:06.080]prophesied a city where awfulness and wonder become the same thing.
[00:12.110]Industrialisation, the machine age and the railways
[00:16.020]would transform the look and the experience of the city.
[00:21.500]No more the beautiful neo-classical Georgian city,
[00:25.110]London was to become a huge sprawling metropolis.
[00:29.350]1 million inhabitants in 1800
[00:32.280]would become six and a half million a century later.
[00:36.100]Now the truest pictures of London
[00:38.940]would find beauty and inspiration in the most horrific qualities of the city.
[01:03.180]This immense view of the sprawling metropolis
[01:06.030]was billed as an illusionistic scene designed to thrill and excite.