"A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste-this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses?" (Page 3)
Winston is describing, from his window, how London looked like. It sounds like London is a dirty place because in the first sentence, Winston is saying how the Ministry of Truth is towering over the GRIMY landscape. I also know London is dirty because it says that the houses were rotten, there is plaster dust swirling around, and there is filthy colonies of wooden dwellings. From Winston's description, I also imagined London as a destroyed-looking place because he mentions how places were bombed and there is heaps of rubble.
-- Janet (:
