'I have no more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of "civilization", which I know now is doomed to destruction, and probably before very long, ' wrote the socialist William Morris in 1885. 'What a joy it is, ' he added in a tone of vengeful satisfaction, 'to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies…' Morris's deliciously intemperate outburst was inspired by After London (1885), a curious novel by the naturalist Richard Jefferies, which depicts a society reshaped by some nameless environmental cataclysm that has almost completely destroyed the British capital. 'This marvellous city, of which such legends are related, ' its narrator unsentimentally comments, 'was after all only of brick, and when the ivy grew over and trees and shrubs sprang up, and, lastly, the waters underneath burst in, this huge metropolis was soon overthrown. ' Morris was bewitched by this vision. ' Absurd hopes curled round my heart as I read it, ' he confided; 'I wish I were thirty years younger. I want to see the game played out. ' In a sense, Morris himself played the game out-in the form of News from Nowhere (1890-91), a utopian romance that he set in London approximately a century after a socialist revolution that, in 1952, transformed the nation's social relations. But, compared to After London, there is something rather tame about Morris's pastoral vision of twenty-first century England, which is centred on a series of picturesque descriptions of Bloomsbury. It domesticates Jeffries's fanaticism.Like Morris, I too have always found the descriptions of the city's destruction that Jefferies included in After London deeply seductive. Indeed, when I see disaster movies in the cinema, I secretly dream about barbarism once more flooding the world. Absurd hopes curl round my heart as I watch entire cities being reduced to rubble by biblical floods and quakes. Because in these ends there is a beginning. The silence of almost empty streets, filmed at first light by the directors of contemporary disaster movies, before the roads and pavements are convulsed by the rhythms of commuters, trembles with utopian promise. 'The post-catastrophe situation, ' in Fredric Jameson's formulation, 'constitutes the preparation for the emergence of Utopia itself. '