A view of the end of the world

My wife was telling me about the farmhouse in which she lived when she was at Kent University in the 1970s. The rent was very cheap because it was in a valley that was going to be flooded to create a reservoir. The farmhouses were abandoned (except by students), the roads disintegrating and the hedges growing out in profusion without the attention of flails. No animals were in the fields that had become the province of wildflowers, and dead trees lay where they fell. Nature was taking over and the manicured garden that is the English countryside was returning to its prelapsarian or, more accurately, its antediluvian state.

It struck me as a vision of the end of the world – our human world anyway; what it might look like in the wake of the ultimate epidemic. It only takes a between twenty and fifty years for a brick-built house to crumble to nothing. It happens slowly at first while the roof remains weather-tight but the rot sets in, literally, when the first slates slip and the water ingresses. After twenty years the roof and windows have gone and the rain begins to dissolve the mortar in the brickwork. After fifty years all that is left is the rusting skeleton of pipe-work and a mound of bricks. This is what most of London would look like. But the towers of Canary Wharf will still be there as modern Pyramids, their concrete proof against all that the English climate can throw at them. Perhaps in three millennia an archeologist will find the HSBC logo and a mission statement engraved on weathered concrete.  This could be the Rosetta Stone of our age – all that our curious descendants will know of what we were.