A Mighty Capital under Threat

The Environmental History of London, 1800-2000

Bill Luckin, Peter Thorsheim, Bill Luckin, Peter Thorsheim

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780822987444
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Demographically, nineteenth-century London, or what Victorians called the "new Rome, " first equaled, then superseded its ancient ancestor. By the mid-eighteenth century, the British capital had already developed into a global city. Sustained by its enormous empire, between 1800 and the First World War London ballooned in population and land area. Nothing so vast had previously existed anywhere. A Mighty Capital under Threat investigates the environmental history of one of the world's global cities and the largest city in the United Kingdom. Contributors cover the feeding of London, waste management, movement between the city's numerous districts, and the making and shaping of the environmental sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

NOTES

Introduction: Environment and Daily Life in London, 1800–2000

1. There is now a large and contentious literature on Roman demographic history. For a detailed overview, see Walter Scheidel, “Roman Population Size: The Logic of the Debate,” in People, Land, and Politics: Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 B.C.–A.D. 14, ed. Luuk de Ligt and Simon Northwood (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 17–70. For further context, see Neville Morley, Metropolis and Hinterland: The City of Rome and the Italian Economy, 200 B.C.–A.D. 200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

2. Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

3. The pioneering study of this topic is Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). See also Sassen’s edited collection, Global Networks, Linked Cities (London: Routledge, 2002). Historians of Rome and the Roman Empire now draw on the idea of globalization to emphasize the nodal and interconnected role played by immensely large urban cities in antiquity. See Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys, eds., Globalisation and the Roman World: World History, Connectivity and Material Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

4. See Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996).

5. Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880–1980 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981).

6. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991). See also Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1347–76.

7. See the seminal work by Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1087–106. For “first” and “second” nature, see Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 56. For compelling overviews of environmental history as a totality, see John R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory 42, no. 4 (Dec. 2003): 5–43; Stephen Mosley, The Environment in World History (London: Routledge, 2010).

8. Douglas, Cities, 1; Martin V. Melosi, “The Place of the City in Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17, no. 1 (1993): 1–23.

9. Joel A. Tarr to Martin V. Melosi, 6 Sept. 1992, cited in Melosi, “Foreword,” in Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink, xxii.

10. James Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, 1830–1914 (London: Routledge, 1993); Colin G. Pooley and Jean Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (London: UCL Press, 1998); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Lynda Nead’s theorized wanderings round Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000) are essential reading for urban-environmental historians.

11. The “great nature debate” continues apace, both among philosophers and historians. See, from a vast literature, Kate Soper, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disasters in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Brian Roberts, Peter J. Atkins, and I. G. Simmons, People, Land and Time: An Historical Introduction to the Relations between Landscape, Culture and Environment (London: Arnold, 1998); James Winter, Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Daniel Schneider, Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

12. S. Martin Gaskell, “Gardens for the Working Class: Victorian Practical Pleasure,” Victorian Studies 23 (summer 1980): 479–501; Howard LeRoy Malchow, “Public Gardens and Social Action in Late Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 29 (autumn 1985): 97–124; Peter Thorsheim, “Green Space and Class in Imperial London,” in The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space, ed. Andrew Isenberg (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 24–37. On the intersection of class and green space for urban residents in the United States, see Matthew W. Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Colin Fisher, Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

13. See Peter J. Atkins, ed., Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012); Hannah Velten, Beastly London: A History of Animals in the City (London: Reaktion Books, 2013).

14. The historiography is well and fully covered in Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, “Liquid Politics: Water and the Politics of Everyday Life in the Modern City,” Past and Present, no. 211 (May 2011): 199–241; John Broich, London: Water and the Making of the Modern City (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Emma M. Jones, Parched City: A History of London’s Public and Private Drinking Water (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2013).

15. Alwyne Wheeler, The Tidal Thames: The History of a River and Its Fishes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); Leslie B. Wood, The Restoration of the Tidal Thames (Bristol, UK: Adam Hilger, 1982); Bill Luckin, Pollution and Control: A Social History of the Thames in the Nineteenth Century (Bristol, UK: Adam Hilger, 1986). See also Dale H. Porter, The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1998); Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999); Rosemary Ashton, One Hot Summer: Dickens. Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). On the Lea, see Jim Clifford, West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshland, 1839–1914 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017).

16. See William A. Cavert, The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Christine L. Corton, Fog: The Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press, 2006).

17. There is no single volume overview of cholera in nineteenth-century Britain; however, see R. J. Morris, Cholera, 1832: The Social Response to an Epidemic (London: Croom Helm, 1976); Michael Durey, The Return of the Plague: British Society and the Cholera, 1831–2 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979); Gerry Kearns, “Cholera, Nuisances and Environmental Management in Islington, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction. Environment and Daily Life in London, 1800–2000
• One. Greater London’s Rapid Growth, 1800–2000
• Two. Imagining the Metropolitan Environment in the Modern Period
• Three. Death and the Environment in London, 1800–2000
• Four. London and Early Environmentalism in Britain, 1770–1870
• Five. Green Space in London: Social and Environmental Perspectives
• Six. Moving East: Industrial Pollution in London, 1800–1920
• Seven. Water and Its Meanings in London, 1800–1914
• Eight. “A Once Rural Place”: Environment and Society in Hackney, 1860–1920
• Nine. Water for the Multitudes: London and New York, 1800–2016
• Notes
• Index