Our hero, Theo, pays a visit to a wealthy friend who lives in a building very much like the well-known Tate Modern.

In the Children of Men there is one beautiful scene which navigates us directly to the title of this article. From this perspective, the two movies seem not to belong to the genre of science-fiction, but to be a rather brilliant detection of the current state of affairs in which the abolishing of public places and civil rights has become frequent. For instance, in both movies, Children of Men and 28 Weeks Later, CCTV cameras are strongly accentuated although we can see them at every step even today. On the contrary, London has been subtly turned into a dystopic city by emphasizing its existing urban characteristics. We are not talking of special effects or architectural interventions like those seen in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) or Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985). In fact, thanks to efficient interventions by the directors of both movies London has been simply ‘polished’ in order to give us a glimpse of its near future, a future one can imagine. What connects these two post-apocalyptic films, apart from other characteristics, is architecture. The military has secured a small part of London while ‘the living dead’, zombies, continue to ravage around. Fresnadillo, 2007), the whole of the British population has been contaminated by a lethal virus introduced in the first part of the same movie. In the second movie, 28 Weeks Later (Juan C. Due to global destruction and ecological catastrophe no human child has been born for 18 years and human civilization as we know it is perhaps facing extinction.

The first of the two movies, Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), tells of London in the year 2027. In the past two years we had the opportunity to watch two excellent British science-fiction films depicting the near or perhaps distant future of the island we know as Great Britain.

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