A Season in Hell

A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.

Marylebone Road, Westminster, NW1

One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up.

Tontone Street, Folkestone, Kent, CT20

I armed myself against justice.

Queenstown Road, Wandsworth, SW8

I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure’s been turned over to you!

Democracy Village, Parliament Square, Westminster, SW1P

I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.

Gerry Judah's Auschwitz-Birkenau Model, The Holocaust Exhibition, Imperial War Museum, Lambeth, SE1

I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched out in the muck. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played tricks on insanity.

From Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873)

Battersea Power Station

Battersea Power Station has always had an unusual grip on the popular imagination. In 1928, when construction began, the Archbishop of Canterbury led a popular revolt against such a belching, toxic thing in the centre of the city.

Battersea Power Station, Kirtling Street, Wandsworth, SW8

By 1939, six years after this 400,000kW ‘flaming altar of modern power’ came on stream, pumping electricity down copper wires and puffing lightly laundered sulphur into the atmosphere…

Battersea Power Station, Kirtling Street, Wandsworth, SW8

…an architectural magazine had voted it the second-best building of the 20th century.

From Stephen Bayley’s More Power to His Elbow, The Guardian (2006)