The appearance of the first industrial city changes the so far created urban scenery in all aspects. The research attempting to examine the industrial city of the 19th century focuses on London the way it is presented and described in the work of the author Ch. Dickens (1812-1870) and of the illustrator G. Dore (1832-1883).
The simultaneous study of other sources or documents of the era, but also the study of later research concerning the industrial city aim at the re-structure of the image of London of that period and at how this image is geographically allocated as well.
With the advent of the railway big parts of London undergo a transformation and the population is rapidly getting larger and larger. The citizens do not move away from the center. Instead, they head for the already densely populated areas and are stacked in former residences of the middle class, while, at the same time, the middle class moves away from the center. London consist of three distinct areas: the City- the medieval city with the narrow, winding and dead-end alleys, the West End which is inhabited by the upper and middle classes and the area around and in the east of the center inhabited by the labourers and all that particular layer of the population who due to poverty are led to vagrancy, begging, theft and even murder. It is the time when in London, more distinctly than in any other city, big contrasts are established.
The enforcement of rules of discipline and control starts at this period to be clearly depicted in the design both of separate buildings such as prisons, asylums, factories, schools etc. and more inclusive buildings such as industrial complexes while large areas of the city start getting influenced by this imposition.
The city is about to explode because of the exorbitant numbers of people who flock in the city. The homeless take advantage of every single corner of the city. Mass diseases are very frequent and people seem to suffer in a “well” which they can’t get away from.
The two fundamental issues of imitation, which are the city of prison and the city of hell, are primarily obvious in the work of Dickens and Dore. They are supported by a wider research of bibliography and pictures regarding these two specific fields of representing the prison and the hell, both of which also act as the bridges between that period and the contemporary world, a fact that can be on its own another issue for totally new research.
