The Chimney of the World

This title explains how and why air quality became an important and keenly contested issue in the world's first industrial city. The book opens by looking at the devastating human and environmental costs of Manchester's steam-driven economic miracle, including acid rain, loss of biological diversity, and the adverse health impacts of air pollution. Part 1 also discusses how the rhythms of the urban smoke cycle helped to shape the city's built environment and came to affect almost every aspect of people's day-to-day lives. The analysis then turns to the interpretation of competing environmental discourses, focusing on how highly diverse narratives about smoke were used by contemporaries to rationalise, naturalise or criticise the dramatic changes wrought by air pollution in 19th-century Manchester. The heavily polluted cityscape was hotly disputed terrain, and Mosley offers an extended critique of opposing viewpoints in the debate. He breaks new ground by seeking to understand working-class ideas about air pollution, as well as those of businessmen and middle-class reformers.
The third part of the book explores not only decision-making about smoke prevention technologies, but also the development of public policy and interest group responses to air pollution. Mosley considers the technological, political and economic dimensions of pollution control in all their complexity. "The Chimney of the World" concludes by reflecting on the compelling continuities (and striking disjunctures) between past and present attitudes towards air pollution. This broad-ranging work seeks to add 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.