Many artists drew and painted the historic shores of the Bosphorus, the deep and narrow channel between Europe and Asia. A favourite subject was the romantic medieval fortress, Rumeli Hisari [Castle of Europe], built by Mehmet II, in a few months before he conquered Constantinople in 1453. It dominates the narrowest part of the straits, opposite its counterpart on the Asia shore, Anadolu Hisari, seen in the distance in Allom’s view. Allom has made a picturesque juxtaposition of the stone crenellations of the castle with the fretted wooden balconies of the houses or yali, that 150 years ago were a distinctive feature of the villages along the Bosphorus.

Although he trained as an architect, Allom is better known now as a topographical artist. In 1834 he was a founder member of the Institute of British Architects, [later the RIBA] of which he became a fellow in 1860. He first drew views to finance himself as a student, but was so successful that he then travelled widely and contributed at least 1500 illustrations to numerous books on places in Europe, the Near East and even China, published during the 1830s and 1840s. Few details of his journeys are known, but between 1828 and 1845 he made extensive sketching tours in England, Scotland, France, Belgium, and Turkey, mainly for the publisher H. Fisher & Son.

Allom obviously delighted in the picturesque details of the Turkish wooden houses, but did not incorporate these ideas into his own architecture. He designed a number of buildings in a wide variety of traditional styles, including workhouses in the Jacobethan manner and neo-Gothic churches, as well as Italianate houses on the Kensington Park Estate in the 1850s.