London Submerged: “It is a vast stagnant swamp, which no man dare enter, since death would be his inevitable fate.”: short extracts from After London, by Richard Jefferies, a post-apocalyptic Victorian novel which imagines the city choked and literally drowned in its accumulated filth, becoming a lifeless brackish marsh in the middle of a renewed, greener England. Nature as London’s implacable enemy, that will one day overturn it: a seductive trope (William Morris admitted that “absurd hopes curled round my heart as I read it”) that runs through British sci-fi (Wyndham, Christopher…) up to JG Ballard, who preferred to imagine the city becoming nature, replicating its jungle laws and desert places.