A Mighty Capital under Threat: The Environmental History of London, 1800-2000, edited by Bill Luckin and Peter Thorsheim

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Mighty Capital under Threat: The Environmental History of London, 1800–2000 ed. by Bill Luckin and Peter Thorsheim Richard Dennis (bio) A Mighty Capital under Threat: The Environmental History of London, 1800–2000, edited by Bill Luckin and Peter Thorsheim; pp. vi + 282. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020, $45.00. Environmental histories of major cities have never been timelier. In A Mighty Capital under Threat: The Environmental History of London, 1800–2000, Bill Luckin and Peter Thorsheim have assembled an impressive team of established scholars—four from Britain, four from the United States, and two from Canada—under a title that promises relevance to debates about threats to cities today as well as in the past. The threats they discuss are mostly those that were perceived at the time: air and water pollution, insufficient open space, poor housing, endemic and epidemic diseases, and the fear that physical deficiencies were associated with moral degeneration. Although the Industrial Revolution is now accepted as the origin of our current environmental crisis, and the book emphasises London's role as an industrial city, few of the contributors make connections to issues [End Page 335] of climate change, increases in atmospheric carbon, more extreme floods, or declining biodiversity. Of course, many of our forebears were unaware of, or unconcerned about, these issues, and they did not use today's language of environmentalism, as Christopher Ferguson observes in his stylish essay on how late Georgian and Victorian commentators understood the term. We should be grateful, nevertheless, for what is collected here. Several chapters seek to get inside the minds of nineteenth-century reformers, local government officials, and, occasionally, ordinary Londoners. Christopher Hamlin explores how London was imagined environmentally, from the aesthetic judgements made by William Wordsworth and William Blake to scientific perspectives on London's metabolism. He offers some brief thoughts on "experiential London," but spends more time on a recurrent theme: London as a city of neighborhoods, each with their own forms of governance affecting how they dealt with sanitary and environmental issues (47). Hamlin urges us to consider the many other places whose environments were transformed by London through programs of scientific exploration, technological intervention, and the circulation of capital, all of which had their origins in the city. He contrasts British-based naturalists, who were "shrewd and critical observers of otherness and complexity" in far-flung parts of the world, but showed little interest in their home capital, with the symbiosis of sociology and ecology in Chicago early in the twentieth century (64). Ferguson, too, tackles the long history of environmentalism, focusing on how London's environment constituted the "circumstances" of inhabitants' lives (89). He traces an evolution in environmentalist thought, especially as physicians paid increasing attention to causes of physical or moral sickness within the suffering human body or attributable to specific human agents. Metaphorically, London ceased to be an "ocean" in which people were "mere droplets" (103). Even so, the notion remained (resurgent in the age of COVID-19) that the solution to Londoners' environmental problems was to leave London. Vanessa Taylor provides a litany of the many meanings of water in nineteenth-century london. Water "saturated the city," washing through every aspect of life and work (156). But its meanings narrowed as it was commodified and acquired a range of exchange values. She also considers the relationship between gender difference and environmental issues. Water rates were paid by mostly male householders, but most water was used by women cooking and washing. Other chapters offer more straightforward, mostly chronological accounts of particular aspects of London's environment: Jim Clifford's presentation of the city's physical expansion, which he charts cartographically from Richard Horwood's map of 1790s London to maps of brownfield sites and roads today; Thorsheim's narration of the development of different kinds of green space; Leslie Tomory's analysis of industrial pollution and the failure of most attempts to control it. Anne Hardy organizes her survey of mortality around Hippocrates's triumvirate of airs, waters, and places, paying attention to connections between indoor and outdoor environments. Sealing window frames and using heavy curtains to keep coal-smoke fogs out produced stifling atmospheres indoors...