Take a Tour of 18th-Century London, Recreated with AI

""very dirty and troublesome to walk through,""

""mighty dirty after the rain,""

""as much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth,""

""much built, yet very dirty and encumbered.""

Seventeenth-century London streets were frequently filthy and troublesome to walk through and became especially dirty after rain. Nineteenth-century London streets accumulated prodigious mud, with animals and people splashed and covered in mire. This foul admixture began to recede permanently only in the 1850s after the installation of sewer systems. Painters and engravers could idealize scenes but still captured traces of urban filth. Contemporary visual projects now convert period paintings and engravings into cinematic animations using artificial intelligence techniques to convey historical urban conditions.

Read at Open Culture