Auerbach has been instrumental in choosing all but one room of the work in Tate Britain — eight paintings for each decade, not quite one a year, of subjects that have never varied: the heads and faces of the people he has known
best and loved most in that time; the streets he has wandered most days, from the
urban confusion of Camden Town in north London up to William Blake's Jerusalem of Primrose Hill, a mile away; and the chim - chiminey view over
rooftops from his studio window.
One was that this vision of a resilient
urban energy system integrating existing natural gas distribution lines could easily integrate sources of renewably generated electricity, as
well — for instance, from
rooftop solar panels in the boroughs where they make sense.