London Bridge Is Falling Down

This picture is part of a series of 85 black and white photographs of London. Entitled “Unreal City”, this photographic series was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land”. In Eliot’s poem London is the “Unreal City” in which most of the characters in the poem have their entrances and exits. The photographs reflect many of the themes of the poem: a strong sense of alienation; people’s inability to connect meaningfully; the cruel demands of the city; the failure of religion to provide comfort in this broken world; and the apparently unbridgeable divide between rich and poor. The dark humour which is evident in several of the pictures emphasizes the “unreality” of life in the capital, but also holds out a few rays of hope that all may not be lost.

In “The Waste Land” this line refers back to l.62 (“A crowd flowed over London Bridge”), and the suggestion here is that the bridge might be collapsing under the weight of the (un)dead – with the additional connotation of “falling towers” – or that it is dissolving into vapour and gradually disappearing into unreality.