London sees the arrival of Italian Futurism with its glorification of machinery, war, and above all, the motor car. The Futurists, in turn, engender Vorticism, possibly Britain’s only homegrown avant-garde movement.

The Vorticists believe that artists should be supreme representations of the individual, that they should make challenging art which rattles the cage of bourgeois society, that art could be an agent for change. Chief among their number is Wyndham Lewis, the self-styled bad boy of British art.

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At the turn of the 20th century, in Britain establishment tastes in art prevailed and leaned traditional. Despite being the heart of a global empire, the country suffered from an island mentality. The fall of Oscar Wilde and his subsequent escape to Paris only added to a suspicion of all things French. Decadence itself had been a French import.

The English, according to the painter and writer, Wyndham Lewis, were philistines "in their bones."

Paris had brought impressionism and post impressionism to the world. London was lagging badly.

But in 1910 the city would finally begin to catch up.

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The Edwardian period tends to get a bad rap - legitimately in the case of human zoos - but is there anything for which we ought to be grateful?

Because of how it ended, with the carnage of the First World War, it’s easy to see the time as the quiet before the storm. But as we saw last episode, this was far from the case. There was rampant culture war, a crisis of confidence about the Empire and what it meant to be British. But there was also an increasing willingness to assert individual freedom and challenge taboos. 

We will see that the period helped give birth to today in fundamental ways: from Eugenics to Psychedelics and even to what has come today to be called intersectional politics.

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We tend to think of the Edwardian period as a dull interlude, where a complacent ruling class lazed away in blissful ignorance of what was coming: industrialised warfare and the dissolution of empire.

In reality, this was a time of huge upheaval. There was the fight for Irish Home Rule, suffragism, socialism and vegetarianism. Telegraph cables stretched around the world. Darwinism had dealt creationism and the Judaic religions that championed it a severe blow. This left a gap for other faiths to fill, as people turned elsewhere to meet the human need for the mysterious.

It was a time of occultism, sex novels and human zoos. It was also when the wheels began to come off the imperial project. And in 1912, this proud maritime nation was able to celebrate a true feat of engineering: the launch of the unsinkable Titanic. 

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Right at London’s centre is Trafalgar Square, presided over, from his column, by the wounded figure of Admiral Nelson. Running into the Square from the East is The Strand. It has been a thoroughfare since Roman times. Along with the trams and omnibuses, carts and cattle, walked our cast of mad, bad and brilliant thinkers whose ideas and energy helped to build the world we know today.

Over the course of this series you will hear from leading writers and academics on London in the Machine Age. But in this first episode you can immerse yourself in the period. You will meet the characters that populate our episodes. Many are flawed, some deeply. Most are consigned to relative obscurity. Yet their work has changed all our lives.

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Some periods, some cities give rise to ideas and circles of thinkers, that are both of the time and outside it. Machine Age London has had a deep legacy on all our lives - on matters as disparate as education, sex, drugs, yoga and rock ‘n’ roll.

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