The Chimney of the World

In this innovative contribution to the field of environmental history, Stephen Mosley explores the devastating human and environmental costs of smoke pollution in the world's first industrial city. Part one explores how the rhythms of the urban smoke cycle helped to shape the city's built environment and affected the way that residents experienced their surroundings. Mosley's analysis then traces competing narratives of smoke, and examines how the rhetoric of smoke was used by...
More Description

In this innovative contribution to the field of environmental history, Stephen Mosley explores the devastating human and environmental costs of smoke pollution in the world's first industrial city. Part one explores how the rhythms of the urban smoke cycle helped to shape the city's built environment and affected the way that residents experienced their surroundings. Mosley's analysis then traces competing narratives of smoke, and examines how the rhetoric of smoke was used by contemporaries to rationalise, naturalise or criticise the dramatic changes wrought by air pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester. Arguing that inhabitants of Manchester constructed an image of smoke as symbolic of wealth, well-being and domesticity, part two of The Chimney of the World explains why a century of campaigning did so little to reduce the city's pollution. The book continues with a discussion of political and technological responses to air pollution, and the activities of the anti-smoke lobby during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chimney of the World concludes by reflecting on the compelling continuities, and striking disjunctures, between past and present attitudes towards air pollution. Drawing upon a wide range of sources from cartoons and postcards to parliamentary reports, this illustrated volume adds a new dimension to the study of urban environmental history: a local perspective that is highly relevant for a better understanding of today's global pollution dilemmas.