Take a Tour of 18th-Century London, Recreated with AI

If you want to know what it was like to live in sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Lon­don, read the diary of Samuel Pepys. While doing so, take note of his fre­quent ref­er­ences to the unclean­li­ness of the city’s streets: “very dirty and trou­ble­some to walk through,” “mighty dirty after the rain,” and dur­ing the large-scale rebuild­ing in the after­math of the Great Fire of 1666, “much built, yet very dirty and encum­bered.” If you want to know what it was like to live in nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Lon­don, read Charles Dick­ens. How­ev­er much-lament­ed the dif­fi­cul­ties it presents to young read­ers, the open­ing of Bleak House remains high­ly evoca­tive, set­ting the scene with “as much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but new­ly retired from the face of the earth,” “dogs, undis­tin­guish­able in mire, and “hors­es, scarce­ly bet­ter; splashed to their very blink­ers.”

This “mud,” an unspeak­ably foul admix­ture of sub­stances, only began to recede per­ma­nent­ly from Lon­don’s streets in the eigh­teen-fifties, after the instal­la­tion of sew­er sys­tems. So nor­mal for so long, its pres­ence would hard­ly have been down­played by the city’s observers back then, whether they record­ed their obser­va­tions on the page or on the can­vas.

Even the painter’s ide­al­iz­ing impulse could only do so much, as evi­denced by some of the shots includ­ed in the new video tour of eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry Lon­don from Majes­tic Stu­dios above. Turn­ing con­tem­po­rary paint­ings and engrav­ings into cin­e­mat­ic ani­ma­tions with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-gen­er­at­ed video, it offers the next best thing to actu­al footage of the city as it would have been seen by the likes of Jonathan Swift, Samuel John­son, Thomas Gains­bor­ough, and Mary Woll­stonecraft.

Sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Lon­don was the cul­tur­al and com­mer­cial cen­ter of Geor­gian Eng­land, but also a city well on its way to becom­ing the cen­ter of the world. Some of its famous sights seen here in their eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry urban con­text include St. Paul’s Cathe­dral by Sir Christo­pher Wren, mas­ter­mind of the city’s post-Great Fire recon­struc­tion; the old Lon­don Bridge, still lined with hous­es and shops; St. James’s Square after its trans­for­ma­tion from a state once con­sid­ered “mud­dy, neglect­ed, and frankly, embar­rass­ing for such pres­ti­gious address­es”; and the Tow­er of Lon­don on the bank of the Riv­er Thames. As for the riv­er itself, it hard­ly goes ignored by the works of art that shape this video, or indeed un-glo­ri­fied by them. But if you know any­thing about its con­di­tion before the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, you’ll be relieved that AI can’t yet restore its smell.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Growth of Lon­don, from the Romans to the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Visu­al­ized in a Time-Lapse Ani­mat­ed Map

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe The­atre in Lon­don

The Evo­lu­tion of Lon­don: 2,000 Years of Change Ani­mat­ed in 7 Min­utes

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Hear the Evo­lu­tion of the Lon­don Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006

The Sights & Sounds of 18th-Cen­tu­ry Paris Get Recre­at­ed with 3D Audio and Ani­ma­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.