The painting is built on the confrontation between two picture-postcard, value-loaded views of Britain. Tower Bridge, the Victorian emblem of an industrially controlled empire, is set between London’s booming financial quarter and its obsolete docklands (now converted into leisure centres and loft apartments for the wealthy). The image is intentionally anonymous, although in fact it was painted from a holiday snap of the artist as a child with his family. Counterpoised to this urban view is a rural idyll of the genre invented by Romantic landscape painters for patrons who had never experienced the degradation of peasant life, and later sold in reproduction to city people nostalgic for a golden age that never existed. Both types of image have penetrated deep into the national consciousness. We are asked to decide which image should be ‘top’ in a way that recalls the republican spirit of the Levellers and ‘the world turned upside down’. The Bottom Lineis a complex picture of the historical and the contemporary: poverty and wealth, the exploitation of one class by another, and the use of powerful myths to conceal the true state of affairs and keep the status quo. It is this true state of affairs that the violent crimson blot in the centre, disfiguring both images equally, asks us to confront and, Rorschach-like, interpret for ourselves.