The Movement for Smoke Abatement in 19th-Century Britain

Abstract

created by workshops and domestic hearths in London. The problem grew acute with the increase in population and the demand for coal in the capital and other towns, apparently diminished with the decrease following the Black Death, and emerged once more in the 16th century as a major grievance.1 Until the 19th century, however, only the metropolitan area and parts of several of the older provincial cities were seriously blighted. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution the problem assumed wholly new dimensions as hundreds of factory chimneys spewed black smoke onto rapidly developing industrial towns. Attention now shifted to the grimy condition of manufacturing cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Leeds, as well as to smaller but equally besmirched communities. The minutes of the governing bodies of these towns are filled with grumblings about the adverse effect of smoke upon health, cleanliness, and temperament. Entire regions eventually were affected-the black belt of central and northern England came into being-and grim humor held that generations of people in these regions had come to believe that in nature the sky was gray and vegetation was black. Nevertheless, in the 1880s foreign competition made control of industrial smoke increasingly unlikely, and attention focused once again on the cumulative pollution pro-