In 1931, Salvador Dali produced The Persistence of Memory in which slithery clocks drape themselves over surrealist forms. In the chronology I have suggested, this marks the moment of subduction, when conscious mourning failed, the Great Depression set in, and the subconscious began its journey towards reconstitution of itself through memory. It was as if time was melting away.

dali

Six years later in 1937, as purist White Walls gave way to reconstitutive bare concrete, the English poet WH Auden commanded:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead.

And for the next 30 years, it is as if, in terms of creativity, time had stopped, and memory, outside of time, took centre stage.

By 1966, memory had secured its triumph. In architectural terms, it found this in the re-expression of brutalist images in the urban forms of the day.

Within the year, the great clock on the tower of St Pancras, so symbolic of Victorian time, also, finally, acquiesced. It broke down, and stopped. No one felt motivated to restart it.

St Pancras

However, once this melancholic journey had been completed, time could be reborn. And, in 1992, time retakes its central position in the City, in the form of an over-sized sundial set into the ground above the Tower Hill Tube station extension, itself a brutalist remnant from the early 1970s.

With memory purged, there is place enough for time.

tower hill clock copy

And, for the first time in almost a century, urban forms rooted in florid historicist reference reappear. Mirroring the utopic, almost pre-lapsarian, visions for Hampstead Garden Suburb in 1906, Quinlan Terry added some villas in the early 1990s to the Outer Circle of Regent's Park:

Regents park villa

The Unreal City of Memory had been completed, the Ideal City of History could be resurrected.