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CANALETTO'S LONDON

London is one of the greatest cities in the world and the River Thames is its beating heart. But if you want to know what London and its river were like at a time of huge growth, CIWEM Executive Director, Nick Reeves, suggests you look at Canaletto's amazing paintings.

Bad news from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and all this talk of catastrophic climate change - with just ten years or so to mitigate the worst of it - makes me want to turn (albeit for just a few moments) to more pleasant and uplifting distractions such as art, the highest form of human expression. How about Canaletto? Not his views of Venice, but of London at its most enchanting, at a time of huge social and economic change, and before we spoiled its skyline.

London, by any measure, is one of the greatest cities in the world and one of the most densely populated. By 1900 it spread 17 miles from one end to the other and one in five of the population of England and Wales (approximately 6,580,000 people), lived there. Throughout its history London has been important for cultural exchange, trade and finance. It has always been a crossroads and transport hub and has attracted settlers from all over the world. It continues to do so today making it one of the most culturally-diverse of any city in the world.

And London remains an area of economic growth, hell-bent on expansion, dedicated to ever-more development, to tourism and a consumer culture. The London 2012 Olympics and its legacy will bring regeneration and benefits galore. Aye, but environmental problems too. And, under its controversial sustainable communities plan the Government intends to build around 200,000 new homes per year over the next five years, including new communities in and near to areas at risk of flooding, to the east of the city along the Thames Gateway. Social housing is one of Gordon Brown's top priorities as he tries to meet the housing needs of a growing population. Never has the city been under so much pressure to accommodate growth as it is today; and this at a time when the spectre of a changing climate threatens to engulf greater London with massive environmental problems of water scarcity, growing demand for energy, rising sea levels, floods and rising temperatures.  This is the continuing story of London and the River Thames: an unfolding tale of unfettered growth, threats to the Green Belt, migration and trade at almost any cost.

But this is not just a story about growth brought about by industrialisation. No, London has always been about these things and by the eighteenth century (the period of 'Enlightenment' when advances in science and the arts were creating a more secular, humanist society), it was already the largest city in the world and its river one of the busiest.  But, what did the city and its river look like in the eighteenth century? To get a sense of the answer to that question you need to look at the paintings of Italian artist, Canaletto, whose fame rests on the iconic images of his home city of Venice.

Until the mid-1700s Canaletto was doing very nicely painting and selling images of Venice, in his unique style, to rich clients on the grand tour. These were the enticing masterpieces that made him rich and famous during his lifetime. But, fortunately for us, the war of Austrian succession broke out and the numbers of rich young aristocrats doing the grand tour fell away and demand for Canaletto paintings declined. Not to be outdone by the small matter of a war, Canaletto decided that if his wealthy clients wouldn't come to him, he must go to them.  So, in 1746 he arrived in London, staying for a period of nine years. This was a time during which he hit a rich vein of creativity and painted some of his greatest pictures. So, by a stroke of good fortune for us in the UK, these were pictures of London and not of Venice.

Canaletto painted wonderful vistas of Greenwich in which riverside London is made to look like canal-side Venice. Thames barges scud across the waves in front of the Royal Naval Hospital like nippy gondolas. Cheery boatman belt out cockney canzoni from midstream. And yet for all the Venetian veneer, these images are undoubtedly of London. But as Canaletto settled in the city, and got to know his subject better, the Venetian mimicry faded away and he depicted London in all its frenetic and burgeoning glory. The Thames is wider and wilder than any grand canal in Venice, and in a series of huge views of it, he begins to celebrate the drama of a busy, bustling and thrusting city, hard-wired to commerce and global trade.

One picture, a thunderous vista from the terrace of Somerset House looking towards Westminster, creates something mighty of the Thames and allows those few buildings that poke above the spiky, two-storey sprawl - Westminster Abbey and the Banqueting House - to strike you as magnificent and monumental. The painting is in the Royal Collection and is a must-see, well worth a trip to London wherever you live. And looking at the painting myself for the umpteenth time, I can see why Prince Charles (who must know the picture well), became such an ardent critic of latter-day London developments and the blight of London's skyline. Looking at this Canaletto who wouldn't 'have a go' at the developers, the planners, the architects and the politicians and want Canaletto's London to stay as he depicted it? What, we must ask, have we done to London in the name of wealth creation?

Looking at these London pictures you can see that Canaletto must have been enthralled by the buzz and the excitement of it all and by the constantly-shifting spectacle. His views of Venice are cryogenically preserved, but his pictures of London are something else - London in a state of flux. The architecture may no longer be familiar, but the rhythm surely is. Almost every view focuses on a new piece of architecture or a new urban development. Westminster Bridge, completed in 1750, is the focus of several spectacular pictures, including that iconic and seminal work with the view through the arch, showing the builders' bucket still hanging from it. And a superb Canaletto of the Old Horse Guards - the one with the man peeing against the wall of Downing Street - was painted just as the  new Horse Guards was about to be built.

Canaletto's nine years in England made him a better artist and widened his range. It stretched his artistic vocabulary. Canaletto in London, in particular, turned out to be a more substantial artist than we might have assumed from his paintings of Venice.  And he became popular too. His move to England was a shrewd business decision and he was lionised by the titled and the wealthy who wanted him to paint their stately piles and estates. Few were better at capturing the feel of an English summer's day as it exists in our memories and in our imaginations. And nobody captured the essence of London and the Thames like Canaletto. It took an Italian artist to see what English artists could not.

Art and the environment is a heady mix. Artistic expression, as Canaletto proved, can make us see things differently and more coherently. It will be a major theme at CIWEM's 'Global Environment' Conference at The Oval, in London, with contemporary artists giving us their take on the environmental challenges of today, on problems that have their roots in Canaletto's London of yesteryear.