The Great Gantry, Charing Cross Station

Muirhead Bone’s etching of a modern construction project captures its vast scale and shadowy complexity, recalling the dark, atmospheric (and imaginary) architecture in the prison prints by the 18th-century Italian artist Piranesi. The term “gantry” refers to the huge moveable scaffolding seen here beneath a vaulted roof of glass. London’s rail terminal at Charing Cross, first built in the 1860s, is still one of the city’s busiest. Its roof had disastrously collapsed in the year before Bone made this image.