A New Zealander visiting the future ruins of London, as imagined by Gustave Doré in the 1870s. Courtesy of the University of Otago. In the decades leading up to the Revolution, some Britons feared America would one day replace England as the seat of the Empire. This led the Lloyd’s Evening Post, in 1774, to imagine what the world might look like in 1974, a weird science-fiction sketch discussed in Bernard Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West: In November [1774], Lloyd’s Evening Post published a short futuristic drama, dated 1974, in which two visitors “from the empire of America” tour the ruins of London—a scene of utter desolation similar to the famous Piranesi prints of Roman ruins: empty, rubble-strewn streets, a single broken wall remaining at the Parliament buildings, Whitehall a turnip field, Westminster Abbey a stable, the Inns of Court a pile of stones “possessed by hawks and rooks,” and St. Paul’s, its cupola collapsed, open to the sky. And why all this “stately desolation”? Why had “this antient and once most august city fallen to a similar decay and ruin with Balbec, Persepolis, Palmyra, Athens, and Rome”? Why had its “sun… set in the West”? A lonely British survivor scrabbling through the ruins “with a dejected countenance” explains why. The posterity of the city’s once great merchants, he tells the American tourists, “are now scattered over the whole world, and more especially have they settled in Imperial America, whither they were followed by most of our artizans and mechanics.” 

A New Zealander visiting the future ruins of London, as imagined by Gustave Doré in the 1870s. Courtesy of the University of Otago.

In the decades leading up to the Revolution, some Britons feared America would one day replace England as the seat of the Empire. This led the Lloyd’s Evening Post, in 1774, to imagine what the world might look like in 1974, a weird science-fiction sketch discussed in Bernard Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West:

In November [1774], Lloyd’s Evening Post published a short futuristic drama, dated 1974, in which two visitors “from the empire of America” tour the ruins of London—a scene of utter desolation similar to the famous Piranesi prints of Roman ruins: empty, rubble-strewn streets, a single broken wall remaining at the Parliament buildings, Whitehall a turnip field, Westminster Abbey a stable, the Inns of Court a pile of stones “possessed by hawks and rooks,” and St. Paul’s, its cupola collapsed, open to the sky. And why all this “stately desolation”? Why had “this antient and once most august city fallen to a similar decay and ruin with Balbec, Persepolis, Palmyra, Athens, and Rome”? Why had its “sun… set in the West”? A lonely British survivor scrabbling through the ruins “with a dejected countenance” explains why.
The posterity of the city’s once great merchants, he tells the American tourists, “are now scattered over the whole world, and more especially have they settled in Imperial America, whither they were followed by most of our artizans and mechanics.” 
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