Amongst the nerves of the world

Christpher Richard Wynne Nevinson painted this dynamic image of Fleet Street when it was the centre of the British news industry in the 1920s. The view is from an upper-storey window at the corner of Shoe Lane and looks east towards Ludgate Hill and St Paul's Cathedral.

Nevinson was influenced by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni's use of forceful lines and hard edges to convey ideas of conflict, atmosphere and noise. Branded the 'English Futurist' by the press, Nevinson followed the imagery rather than the theoretical ideas of his Italian counterparts.

Advertising signs and criss-crossing telephone and telegraph wires represent the 'nerve centre' at the end of the decade. London is shown as an energetic modern city, protected beneath the solid dome of St Paul's Cathedral. Telegraph wires and perspective lines break up the composition into shardlike segments, a technique derived from Boccioni.