That sense of monstrousness abides in the Palace of Westminster. The German ÈmigrÈ W.G. Sebald would write of another gothic institution, the Palais de Justice in Brussels: ‘At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.‘7 So too we see Westminster through a utopian/dystopian lens, an international emblem of all England, always seen in silhouette at one remove: from the river bank, from the train, or from the air. It seemed thus to Henry Mayhew and John Binny when they ascended over London in 1852. Republished in Humphrey Jennings’ Pandaemonium, along with a Dore-like engraving of a ghostly balloon, its tethers hanging like severed threads, hovering in the penumbral, storm-clouds over the stalagmite-like skyline of the Palace of Westminster – a dark mirage out of the past or some apocalyptic future – the now industrialised city was laid before these nineteenth-century aeronauts, their journey made other by the altitude, like a map being unrolled in slow motion (a view which the contemporary visitors may obtain in a flight from the London Eye, itself a kind of Jules Verne fantasy for the millenium).

As Mayhew and Binny rose, so ‘the earth seemed to sink suddenly down’, leaving ‘the leviathan Metropolis, with a dense canopy of smoke hanging over it, and reminding one of the fog of vapour that is often seen steaming up from fields at early morning. It was impossible to tell where the monster city began or ended, for the buildings stretched not only to the horizon on either side, but far away into the distance, where owing to the coming shades of evening and the dense fumes from the million chimneys, the town seemed to blend into the sky, so that there was no distinguishing earth from heaven’.8

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