London's South Bank is these days unrecognisable from how it would have looked in the late 19th century, said Florence Hallett on the i news site. Back then, the area now dominated by the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre was "a crush of factories billowing filth, smoke and steam from giant chimneys, accompanied ... by a cacophony of animals and machines".
The hellish scene was a source of great inspiration to Claude Monet, who visited three times between 1899 and 1901 and painted dozens of pictures of the view from his room at the Savoy hotel. A successful exhibition of 37 of these works was staged in Paris in 1904, but his plans for a second showing in London never materialised: most of the paintings had been sold and buyers were reluctant to part with them.
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