How 1926 Imagined 2026

The London of the future is now.

Welcome to Londonist: Time Machine, the newsletter about London history… and future.

A new year has dawned. But 2026 has been anticipated. Exactly 100 years ago, London Underground released this transport poster, depicting life in the city a century hence… which is to say, right now.

This poster is 100 years old. Image: TfL

The artwork by Montague B. Black shows a futuristic metropolis with lofty buildings and ubiquitous air transport. Below it all, the reassuring presence of the London Underground roundel. Even in the distant future, the good old Tube will be there to see you home.

Montague B. Black was not so wide of the mark. As you might have noticed, we do indeed have tall buildings in 2026; some, perhaps, taller than those he depicted. I think he’s even got the locations about right. Both St Paul’s and Tower Bridge can be seen on the poster, and if we use those to get our bearings then the tallest ‘scrapers are located in Southwark and the eastern City, just as in real life. And is that the silhouette of One Canada Square (Canary Wharf) on the far right?

(By the way, I’m not sure where the Underground station is supposed to be… looks like it’s roughly where Strand meets Fleet Street… not that Black was attempting any kind of accurate street plan.)

Meanwhile, the skies of 2026 are abuzz with engines, just as Black foresaw. Look to the London skies at any time of day and you’ll easily spot half a dozen planes, with occasional helicopters and drones. No blimps, though, sadly.

The most satisfyingly part of the poster, subtle yet central, is the Underground itself. The red-and-blue roundel shown in the image was already 18 years old in 1926. It would go through its evolutions, but is still recognisable today, a century on. And the Tube, of course, remains as important and iconic to London as it ever was.

Black’s poster is a attractive vision of London life in the distant future (as it was to him). But this was not the only glimpse of 2026 from a century ago.

A favourite New Year’s wheeze of newspaper editors — then as now — is to commission commentary on what the world might be like in 100 years. A century is such a long time that nobody concerned could expect to be proved wrong on this side of the grave. Indeed, anyone writing such an article in 1926 would assume that their words would soon be lost to posterity. Newspapers were routinely archived, but who would ever find one short article among the mountains of archival newsprint?

Well, now we can. With ready access to searchable, digital newspaper archives, it’s the easiest thing in the world to run a query on the phrase “year 2026” and see what results pop up. Let’s unearth some of the forgotten predictions from 100 years ago…

Life in 2026, as imagined in 1926

The prize for bleakest take of this nature must go to the Croydon Times of 3 November 1926. “Watched by State from Birth to Death,” was the ante-Orwellian headline. “LETHAL CHAMBERS FOR THE USELESS!” shouted the standfirst.

This eye-catching doomspeak is quoting from a lecture given by a Dr James Ness MacBean Ross in the parish hall of St Nicholas’s church in Sutton.

This is the church, not the parish hall. Sadly, I didn’t think to photograph that, last time I was passing through. Image: Matt Brown

In his address, MacBean Ross looked specifically at the future of medicine and society 100 years hence. Every one of his predictions assumes an ultra-authoritarian State, which even has a say in whom you can marry:

“Before any clergyman would join two loving souls in the bonds of holy matrimony he would have to have at least two medical certificates proving that they were in every way free from disease, had an unblemished heredity, and were physically fit to undertake the responsibility of propagating the race.”

Were a clergyman to overlook any of these requirements, reckoned MacBean Ross, then he might expect a heavy fine or even imprisonment.

Thankfully, these eugenically framed unions have not come to pass. Voluntary genetic screening for some inherited diseases is not uncommon in the UK, either during pregnancy or even ahead of marriage. Under no circumstances does UK law mandate it, however.

MacBean Ross predicts a future where the rules of matrimony have got stricter. In fact, the opposite happened. His “clergymen…[who would] join two loving souls” is increasingly rare, with the vast majority of UK weddings featuring civil rather than religious ceremonies. Weddings are not limited to churches or civic buildings — couples have tied the knot on the deck of the Cutty Sark and in the capsules of the London Eye — unthinkable ceremonies in 1926. Men marry men; women marry women; and couples of every stripe marry for reasons beyond “propagating the race”.

Speaking of which, the good doctor has an authoritarian prognosis for pregnancy, too. “The expectant mother,” he reckons, “would have to acquaint the Ministry of Health of her state even before telling her husband”. All babies, we’re told, would be automatically ‘card-indexed’ while still in utero, and every lifetime ailment would documented in elaborate records. This gets more accurate as it goes on. There is no legal obligation in the UK to register any pregnancy with anyone (though, of course, most people do, to access checkups). Only after birth does the State need telling. Thereafter, any interaction with the NHS is recorded.

At the end of life, continues our soothsayer, the person’s “body would be hygienically disposed of in the Urban Council’s crematorium”. The reader of 1926 might have shuddered at this. Cremation was still vanishingly rare in England at the time — something like 0.5% of all funerals. Today the figure is well over 80%. It’s quite the sea change, and accurately foreseen by MacBean Ross.

Our sage continues to score hits. “Injections would be made for every infectious disease,” he predicts, “life will be greatly prolonged”. Inoculation was still fairly rare in the 1920s, with the exception of the smallpox vaccine. Today, a typical child is vaccinated against around 15 diseases, from tetanus and polio to measles, mumps and rubella. Meanwhile, large sectors of society seek seasonal vaccines for flu and Covid. While we’re nowhere near eliminating “every infectious disease”, vaccine programmes have greatly reduced the mortality rates from so many erstwhile killers.

Oh look, it’s that roundel again. Image: Matt Brown

As for other ailments, surgery would be the saviour. The child of 2026, MacBean Ross supposed, would have their appendix removed before age seven, along with all teeth, tonsils and adenoids. These universal disfigurements would not be done at direct personal expense, but through the tax system — a kind of ghastly foreshadowing of the NHS. Happily for all of us, dental care has improved massively since the 1920s, and while tonsillitis and appendicitis are reasonably common, they’re usually treated without serious issues.

A final and horrific vision of dystopia, hinted at in the headline, is saved for last.

“Naturally, the world would become over populated and the Ministry of Health would have lethal chambers, conveniently close to its crematoriums, where those who were of no further use to the community would be disposed of with the minimum personal discomfort.”

Lethal chambers? Mass ‘disposal’ of the unwanted? I don’t know if Dr MacBean Ross is making grim jests or seriously thought such things were likely. Either way, it’s impossible to read his words of 1926 with hindsight and not think of the horrors that would come just a decade and a half later…

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Let’s return to more pleasant themes. As it turns out, the future of marriage was not just on the mind of MacBean Ross. In 1926, the Daily News ran a series of articles (calling it a ‘symposium’) on the possibilities for 2026, commissioned from leading thinkers of the day. This was at a time when women’s roles in society were changing rapidly, with the Vote secured and increasing numbers gaining professional qualifications. What did all this betoken for the household of the future?

Most of the essays are variations on the theme of equality in marriage, with a few wild cards such as “it will be common for women to propose to men”. One of the more radical submissions came from the novelist Arnold Bennett. He foresaw unions that were much more liberal than those of his own day:

By the time that 2026 is reached… we may have arrived, too, at a stage when we shall practice experimental marriage, and may also have realised by that time that the origin of trouble in most marriages is the too close and too constant companionship of the twain, “who simply get sick of one an-other.” “Two thousand and twenty-six, says Mr. Bennet, “will see a delightful but temperate elasticity in the geographical movements of husband and wife, an elasticity by which society will assuredly profit.”

‘Experimental marriage’ referred to a kind of ‘trial marriage’ where two people cohabit without officially tying the knot. It might also be regarded as a euphemism for pre-marital sex, which was still largely taboo in the 1920s (though no-doubt rife). Bennett thought it would “strike posterity as absurd” that young people should be “irrevocably bound” through marriage without first testing their compatibility. If I may presume to speak on behalf of posterity, then “yes, it was absurd”… though we should also bear in mind the limitations of contraception, sex education and welfare-state safety nets available to that generation.

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A cricketing interlude, for which I’m stumped. In 1926, England cricket captain A.W. Carr courted controversy after he won the toss, but forced Australia to bat first (against established practice that the toss-winning team bats first). One newspaper at the time predicted that cricket fans would still be debating this outrage in 2026. Is that the case? I have zero knowledge of the sport, beyond what I learned from reading Douglas Adams novels.

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So, we’ve had the future of weddings, funerals, more weddings and cricket. But what about that staple of futurology: the technology of tomorrow? The Rev. Basil G. Bourchier of Hampstead Garden Suburb had a few excellent and prescient thoughts, as reprinted in the Newmarket Journal of 17 July 1926. When he says “press the button”, read “Deliveroo”:

“Domestic service by 2026 will be as extinct as slavery or witchcraft. “Press the button” will be the order of the day. Every house will be replete with these “buttons”. Pray heaven, you don’t post the wrong one and instead of your breakfast appearing, half a ton of coals is shot out!! But, there probably won’t be any coal a hundred years hence. Whether or not the multiplication of inventions of one sort and another is likely to make for connubial happiness is an open question. Personally, I doubt it. For example, by 2026 there will have been invented an instrument whereby one person will be able, not only to speak to, but to see, another person over a distance of many miles.”

(I think his implication in that last sentence is that one spouse can keep an eye on the other, preventing any ‘cheeky halves’ or extra-marital naughtiness.)

I’d say most of that has come to pass in one form or another. Domestic service, at least of the ‘live-in’ variety, has indeed dwindled to almost nothing. Pushing buttons for delivery is a daily occurrence for many — albeit keyboard or phone ‘buttons’. Domestic coal fires are not just rare in London; they’re against the law. And, of course, almost all of us have the technology in our pockets to “see another person over a distance of many miles”. Top marks to Rev. Bourchier.

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And finally, one to ponder from the Daily Mirror of 1925. As the year turned, the paper marvelled at the effort that goes into the annual updates of trade directories, ‘Who’s who’ lists, phone books and other compendiums…

Found in the British Newspaper Archive.

A very good question. When you think of the answer (‘we do most of it online with websites, wikis, listicles, Facebook groups and the like, and use Google and AI rather than almanacks to look things up’), then it’s clear that someone predicting information management one hundred years in the future could not have got anywhere close to the truth.

What then will be the nature of record-keeping (and wider society) in the year 2126? Let’s have your best predictions in the comments section, so that holographic Mattbot Prime can have a good laugh at your naivety, 100 years hence.

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Thanks for reading! As ever, contact me on matt@londonist.com any time with thoughts, suggestions, questions… and invitations to look around your historical buildings/archives!