Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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published in . On three LCC estates the survey found that per cent,
per cent and per cent of people liked their homes and that per cent, per
cent and per cent liked their neighbourhood.
75
We need also to take account
of the diversity of middle-class suburban life. Far from being privatised, middle-
class suburbs were characterised by their burgeoning associational club life. And
while the tennis club and amateur theatricals may have offered one, perhaps pre-
dominant, form of association, by the mid-s, as Tom Jeffrey has shown, Left
Book Clubs and a host of aid committees provided another. ‘In and ’,
Jeffrey writes, ‘the London suburbs hummed with the activity of these groups’.
76
As well as a move to the suburbs within conurbations, there was also a large
net movement from Wales, Scotland and the North-East to London and the
South-East, and, to a lesser extent, the Midlands. London and the South-East
gained . million people through migration between and . This
movement was a reflection, albeit a pale one, of the changing labour market; not
in the sense of relative wage levels, however, but of relative levels of unemploy-
ment.
77
Nevertheless, the movement of people lagged behind the shifting geo-
graphical location of industrial output. In part this was because skills were not
easily transferable between locations. But as for the period and , insti-
tutional factors were also significant. Above all, the dole, rent control and the
advance of council housing with its attendant local residence requirements were
major disincentives to mobility.
78
In the face of adversity and with a minimum
standard of life guaranteed by the state, large numbers of the unemployed dis-
played a sensible preference for what was familiar and for minimising risks; they
did not migrate.
As a result, the state itself now entered directly as a force actively promoting
internal migration. From the government’s policy response was to seek to
encourage labour to move from areas with high unemployment, initially colliery
areas, by offering financial assistance. By over , individuals, some
, households, had transferred using the scheme. The scheme, however,
quickly ran into opposition, both from areas of out-migration, which increas-
ingly were left with an ageing and economically dependent population, and from
labour interests in receiving areas who objected to the additional competition in
the search for scarce jobs. Equally important, the scheme disenchanted those
many voices raising alarm at the unremitting expansion of London.
79
David Feldman
75
Mass-Observation, An Enquiry into People’s Homes (London, ), pp. –.
76
T. Je ffery, ‘A place in the nation: the lower-middle class in England’, in R. Koshar, ed., Splintered
Classes (New York, ), p. .
77
H. Makower, J. Marschak and H. Robinson, ‘Studies in mobility of labour: analysis for Great
Britain, part ’, Oxford Economic Papers, (), –.
78
S. Glynn and A. Booth, ‘Unemployment in interwar Britain: a case for relearning the lessons of
the s’, Ec.HR, nd series, (), .
79
Pitfield, ‘Labour migration and the regional problem’; A. D. K. Owen, ‘The social consequences
of industrial transference’, Sociological Review, (), –.
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Accordingly, from the mid-s policy began to change. In the govern-
ment began to develop measures designed to take industry to the unemployed
in what were now designated ‘Special Areas’, rather than encourage the unem-
ployed to migrate to the South and the Midlands. At the same time, a different
migration policy was formulated. In a government report on the depressed
areas had asserted that ‘the evils actual and potential of this increasing agglom-
eration of human beings are so generally recognised as to need no comment’.
80
This opinion was further reinforced by the Political and Economic Planning
Report on the Location of Industry, published in , and the Report of the
Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population – known as
the Barlow Report – which was published in .
Both of these reports focused on the environmental hazards arising from
migration to conurbations and the limitless capacity of those conurbations to
spread outwards. They were concerned with health and housing conditions, the
absence of open spaces and playing fields, and the problems of smoke, noise,
traffic and industrial waste. The Barlow Report was particularly significant
because its major policy recommendations formed the basis of post-war plan-
ning policy. So far as migration was concerned, Barlow’s key recommendation
was for the ‘decentralisation or dispersal, both of industries and industrial pop-
ulation’ from ‘congested urban areas’.
81
During the war this conclusion was rein-
forced by Patrick Abercrombie whose Greater London Plan met with
acclaim and proposed ten satellite towns to relieve pressure from Greater
London, and by a similar programme designed for the West Midlands.
82
The
upshot was the New Towns Act. By fourteen new towns had been
established, eight of them around London. In conception, new towns were the
apotheosis of interwar thinking on migration: they were designed to arrest
migration to existing cities, to disperse the population of those cities, to spread
industry and to create an aesthetically pleasing environment and new urban
communities. The new town was the planners’ riposte to the suburb.
(v)
In a sense, a century on, public discourse on migration had come full circle; once
again migration was thought of as an environmental hazard. But there was one
fundamental difference between the debate on migration in and that in .
For now it was not marginal minorities – the lodging house population or the
Irish – that were seen to be the problem but the totality of migration itself. This
recurrent theme as well as its development over time both serve to underline one
Migration
80
Cited in J. D. McCallum, ‘The development of British regional policy’, in D. Maclennan and
J. Parr, eds., Regional Policy (Oxford, ), p. .
81
Ibid., pp. –; Pitfield, ‘Labour migration and the regional problem’, pp. –.
82
P. Abercrombie, The Greater London Plan (London, ).
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of the main arguments of this chapter, namely, that migration is best understood
as a political and cultural phenomenon as well as a facet of demographic and eco-
nomic systems. This has some important implications for our understanding both
of the causes of migration and of the historical experience of migrants in urban
Britain. It suggests that this history ought not be understood as a series of inevi-
table responses, respectively, to the demand for labour and to the capacities of par-
ticular groups to adapt. Instead, this essay has argued for the adoption of more
interactive and dynamic models of explanation. It has also argued that mobility
cohered into a problem of migration as it was interpreted through some of the
predominant social and political concerns of the moment, and as it was seen to
contribute to them. Migrants repeatedly have been the objects of policy makers’
interventions, reformers’ Jeremiads and journalists’ sensationalism. Successive
controversies on migrants and migration allow us to trace and illumine anew the
changing formulations of ‘the social problem’ in urban Britain.
David Feldman
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·
·
Pollution in the city
W
in an era in which global crisis is permanently, threateningly
present. Despite that fact little work has yet been completed within
the mainstream of social, economic and urban history on the
origins, distribution and impact of environmental pollution in the ‘first indus-
trial nation’.
1
Nor have the nature and extent of the dilemma in towns and cities
between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries been systematically
explored or interpreted. Compared with similar research in North America and,
to a lesser extent, France, British environmental history is in this sense under-
developed and methodologically immature.
2
This is surprising on a number of
counts. First, research programmes are frequently influenced and at times deter-
mined by pressing contemporary concerns. Secondly, cognate disciplines – and
particularly sociology and anthropology – have already begun to throw light on
pollution processes as social as well as socially constructed, phenomena.
3
Thirdly,
I would like to thank Anne Hardy, John Hassan, Graham Mooney and Harold Platt for comments
and criticisms of earlier drafts of this chapter.
1
The best existing study is A. S. Wohl, Endangered Lives (London, ). But see also K.Thomas,
Man and the Natural World (London, ); P. Brimblecombe and C. Pfister, eds., Silent Countdown:
Essays in European Environmental History (London and Berlin, ); and M. Shortland, ed., Science
and Nature (Stamford in the Vale, ). In addition, the writings of Christopher Hamlin, liber-
ally cited below, are seminal. J. A. Hassan, Prospects for Economic and Environmental History
(Manchester, ) outlines the larger historiographical situation.
2
For North America see M. V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities – (Austin,
Tex., ); K. E. Bailes, Environmental History: Critical Issues in Comparative Perspective (Lanham,
); and J. A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron,
Ohio, ). On France see A. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, trans. M. L. Kochan (Leamington
Spa, ). D. Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge, Mass.,
); and A. F. Laberge, Mission and Method: The Early Nineteenth Century French Public Health
Movement (Cambridge, ).
3
M. Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, ); M. Douglas, ‘Environments at risk’, in M. Douglas,
Implicit Meanings (London, ), pp. –; and M. Douglas and A. Wildavsky, Risk and Culture
(Berkeley and London, ). See also U. Beck, The Risk Society:Towards a New Modernity, trans.
M. Ritter (London, ); and B. Wynne, Rationality and Ritual:The Windscale Inquiry and Nuclear
Decisions in Britain (BSHS Monograph, , Chalfont St Giles, ).
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writers in these fields are providing provisional answers to a crucial and essen-
tially historically rooted question: how was it that, in this particular place and
this particular time, this particular environmental dilemma came, finally, to be
intepreted as unendurable?
4
In what follows the literature will be surveyed in order to illuminate relation-
ships between urban and environmental change during the period under review.
An opening section outlines the social and legal processes and traditions that par-
tially defined urban-based pollution. This is complemented by an overview of
the production, treatment and disposal of human and manufacturing waste, and
the contamination of river and domestic drinking water. A fourth section is
devoted to the construction of a provisional narrative of the beginnings of a
‘refuse revolution’. By way of conclusion, an assessment is provided of the
impact of atmospheric pollution and general chronological issues. Although
attention is directed throughout to the fortunes of individual towns and cities,
the approach is also ecological and systemic, emphasising the ways in which indi-
vidual localities transmitted waste material to others within the urban hierarchy.
An additional and important theme is that relatively small towns frequently trig-
gered regional environmental dilemmas that were disproportionate to their dem-
ographic status.
(i)
Pollution attributable exclusively to urban-located activities is difficult to
identify. But it undoubtedly afflicted all those places in which demographic
growth during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was unusually
rapid, in-migration heavy and the poorest members of the community subject
to exceptionally high levels of overcrowding. Manufacturing pollution – both
of air and of water – was also invariably present, though not necessarily as
a result of effluents associated with new and dynamic sectors of the economy;
traditional activities – such as mining, papermaking and dyeing – also radi-
cally undermined environmental salubrity. The unplanned proximity of mills,
factories and workshops to domestic dwellings ensured that conditions of
life were always likely to deteriorate from levels that had intermittently threat-
ened to become critical during the early and mid-eighteenth century. But
there was little predictability or homogeneity. Indeed, it is precisely unexpected
variations within and between urban areas which require the close attention
of the environmental historian. In terms of relevant quantitative indicators,
analysis of the level of infant mortality, characterised by George Rosen as a
highly sensitive guide to the quality of environmental and communal life, is
Bill Luckin
4
Douglas, ‘Environments at risk’; Douglas and Wildavsky, Risk and Culture; and C. Hamlin,
‘Environmental sensibility in Edinburgh, –: the fetid irrigation controversy’, JUH,
(), –.
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indispensable.
5
Thus in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London,
Sheffield and Bradford there were clear connections between higher than
average infant mortality and poorer than average access to environmental and
infrastructural provision.
6
Prolonged exposure to an industrialised environment
may also in itself have played a role in sustaining levels of infant death greatly
above the national average.
7
In terms of cause-specific mortality at all ages, large-
scale incidence of cholera, typhoid, dysentery and diarrhoea invariably indicated
radical deterioration in the quality of water supplies, while upward seasonal shifts
in pneumonia, bronchitis and asthma would in time point to dangerously high
levels of atmospheric impurity. In spatial terms, adverse developments in one
part of an urban community invariably had dangerous repercussions for the
inhabitants of others. Like bacteria and viruses, sulphurous smoke and polluted
drinking water were blind to the formal administrative subdivisions of nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century towns and cities. Pollution generated in a large
industrial area flowed outwards to exert far-reaching though non-quantifiable
effects on the inhabitants of other towns, suburbia and, increasingly, as time went
on, villages and hamlets. Sometimes relatively small towns – St Helens or Widnes
in the early years of the alkali industry, Swansea at the beginning of the copper-
smelting boom – inflicted disproportionate damage on the regions in which they
were located.
8
In a classic article, Emmanuel Ladurie has argued that the ‘microbe’ played a
key role in the cultural ‘unification’ of the known world between the fourteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
9
The spatial dissemination of urban-generated pollu-
tion may have worked in a similar manner, with environmental deterioration
Pollution in the city
5
G. Rosen, ‘Disease, debility and death’, in H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff, eds., The Victorian City, vol.
(London, ), pp. –. See also P. Townsend, N. Davidson and M. Whitehead, eds.,
Inequalities in Health (Harmondsworth, ), pp. –, – and –.
6
N. Williams, ‘Death in its season: class, environment and the mortality of infants in nineteenth-
century Sheffield’, Social History of Medicine, (), –; N. Williams and G. Mooney, ‘Infant
mortality in an “age of great cities”: London and the English provincial cities compared, c.
–’, Continuity and Change, (), –; and B. Thompson, ‘Infant mortality in
nineteenth-century Bradford’, in R. Woods and J. Woodward, eds., Urban Disease and Mortality in
Nineteenth-Century England (London, ), pp. –.
7
C. H. Lee, ‘Regional inequalities in infant mortality in Britain, –: patterns and hypoth-
eses’, Population Studies, (), –; and E. Garrett and A. Reid, ‘“Satanic mills, pleasant
lands”: spatial variation in women’s work and infant mortality as viewed from the Census’,
HR, (), –.
8
T. C. Barker and J. R. Harris, A Merseyside Town in the Industrial Revolution (Liverpool, ); A. E.
Dingle, ‘“The monster nuisance of all”: landowners, alkali manufacturers and air pollution
–’, Ec.HR, nd series, (), –; and R. Rees, ‘The South Wales copper-smoke
dispute, –’, Welsh History Review, (), –.
9
E. Le Roy Ladurie, ‘A concept: the unification of the globe by disease (fourteenth to sixteenth
centuries)’, in E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Mind and Method of the Historian, trans. S. and B. Reynolds
(Chicago, ), pp. –. See also A. W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism:The Biological Expansion
of Europe – (Cambridge, ), ch. .
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reflecting and defining the increasing interconnectedness and indivisibility of the
myriad localities that comprised nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain.
Simultaneously, and paradoxically, however, pollution of air and water reinforced
deeply embedded tensions and hostilities between town and country.
10
This is best
illustrated by what, until the Edwardian period, continued to be the single most
significant institutional definer and reflection of environmental conflict and
anxiety – the demand, in terms of a common law injunction, that a given action
be formally designated a nuisance and steps taken to reduce or stabilise its inten-
sity. The reasons for the longevity of nuisance proceedings – levelled against either
an individual or a collective board – may be explained in terms of the weakness
of national legislation. Thus progress between the passing of the Rivers Pollution
Prevention Act of and the Rivers (Prevention of Pollution) Act of
should be attributed more to the activities of joint regional river boards, first
established in the s, than largely inactive municipalities and sanitary author-
ities. (A cluster of complementary acts passed between the early s and the
later s to protect salmon against over-fishing and polluted river water proved
largely ineffective.
11
) For the bulk of the period under review, scientists failed to
agree on what constituted a polluted supply of water, or how quantitative chem-
ical standards should be enforced on socially disparate riparian interest groups.
For their part, the latter clung tenaciously to customary usage, denying that con-
taminated water was responsible for the transmission of disease and insisting that
any form of control would traumatically undermine regional economic activity,
inflicting unemployment and poverty on entire urban communities. When, from
the mid-s onwards, a legal framework for prosecution was finally created,
enforcement lay predominantly in the hands of sanitary authorities, who were
themselves frequently guilty of large-scale sewage pollution, as well as being
under the influence of powerful cliques of manufacturers. The marginally more
active policies followed from the s onwards by the river boards, mainly situ-
ated in the northern industrial areas, were based on commitment to the environ-
mental integrity of the watershed, rather than the property rights or interests of
individuals or individual urban localities. Stricter control of the pollution of
rivers, whether attributable to the disposal of untreated or under-treated sewage
or manufacturing effluent, represented, in that sense, a reduction in the power
and influence of urban elites in relation to the use of the environment. But it also
gave rise to the belief that trade was being made subservient to the rod.
Bill Luckin
10
L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristrocracy (Oxford, ), pp. –; R. Williams, The Country and
the City (London, ); P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns – (Oxford, ), ch.
; and Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. –. For a comparative perspective see the path-
breaking W. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, ), ch. .
11
R. M. MacLeod, ‘Government and resource conservation: the Salmon Acts Administration,
–’, Journal of British Studies, (), –. See also P. Bartrip, ‘Food for the body and
food for the mind: the regulation of freshwater fisheries in the ’s’, Victorian Studies, (),
–.
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With only minor, local exceptions, legal action against suspected smoke pol-
luters was even less effective. There may have been extensive propaganda against
noxious vapours and this was reflected in minor victories achieved against the
chemical and related industries under successive and incremental Alkali Acts
from the s onwards.
12
But it was long-term technological change in rela-
tion to the production of smokeless fuel immediately before and after the Second
World War, together with a catastrophic environmental and human tragedy – the
Great London Smog in – which finally precipitated the passing of the Clean
Air Act in .
13
Local research in the field is meagre but only a small number
of centres – Derby, Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester and London
– framed local acts or by-laws that annually led to the prosecution of more than
a handful of offenders.
14
During the s largely ineffectual regulations were
introduced in the capital through the unexpected intervention of Lord
Palmerston.
15
At the same time by-laws in smoky Bradford proved unenforce-
able:
16
and twenty years later, in Leeds, it was still very nearly impossible to
obtain meaningful prosecutions.
17
The reasons for failure were clear. Even more
comprehensively than in relation to the pollution of rivers, laissez-faire arguments
– that any attempt to enforce anti-smoke legislation on to the manufacturing
districts would be accompanied by the closing down of factories – neutralised
reformist agendas. The widely held belief that foggy towns were prosperous, and
that domestic smoke was harmless when compared with a very small number of
noxious manufacturing vapours, further strengthened the non-interventionist
case. To this was added the problem of inspection. The precise origin, it was
argued, of a specific black and sooty emission could only be identified if an
enforcing agency were to employ police, spies or inspectors. Until the early
twentieth century the last of these possibilities – a fully fledged and centralised
anti-smoke bureaucracy – continued to be stridently opposed by businessmen
and laissez-faire politicians. ‘Parliament’, as one commentator has noted, ‘passed
laws giving local authorities the power to act; the local authorities, forced to con-
front the polluters at close quarters in the councils and courts, wavered and
passed the responsibility back to the central government. In the end, little abate-
Pollution in the city
12
R. M. MacLeod, ‘The Alkali Acts administration, –: the emergence of the civil scientist’,
Victorian Studies, (), –.
13
H. Heimann, ‘Effects of air pollution on human health’, in Air Pollution (World Health
Organisation Monograph, , Geneva, ), pp. –; and W. P. D. Logan, ‘Mortality in the
London fog accident, ’, The Lancet, (), –.
14
R. Hawes, ‘The municipal regulation of smoke pollution in Liverpool, –’, Environment
and History, (), –. See also C. Bowler and P. Brimblecombe, ‘The difficulties of abating
smoke in late Victorian York’, Atmospheric Environment, B (), –.
15
E. Ashby and M. Anderson, The Politics of Clean Air (Oxford, ), pp. –.
16
A. Elliott, ‘Municipal government in Bradford in the mid-nineteenth century’, in D. Fraser, ed.,
Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (Leicester, ), pp. –.
17
B. Barber, ’Municipal government in Leeds, –’, in Fraser, ed., Municipal Reform, pp.
–.
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ment was achieved.’
18
These, then, were the legal and social contexts within
which, between the mid-nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, farmers
continued to seek injunctions against manufacturers for polluting river water that
ran through their fields and landowners sued manufacturers for damage inflicted
on crops, gardens and what would later come to be known as ‘amenity’. In more
complex variants of the same scenario, sanitary authorities took action against
other sanitary authorities, for failing to cleanse or deodorise sewage which,
when it flowed downstream, made life unendurable for those forced to live too
close to river banks. At a bizarre extreme, as in Birmingham during the s,
a landowner obtained an interim order against that municipality as a result of the
latter’s seeming success in meeting the conditions of an earlier restraint.
19
Until
the very end of the nineteenth century, therefore, the socially constructed and
inherently pre-industrial and anti-collectivist mechanism of the nuisance con-
tinued to a significant degree substantively to define pollution and pollutant. But
it also increased rather than diminished conflict between interest groups, holding
different views about the uses of nature. The concept of the nuisance – finally
– directs historical attention to the role played throughout the period by dis-
placement, or the manner in which a state of affairs deemed unendurable in one
centre might be transposed in a subtly different form to another locality, geo-
graphically distant from it.
Such quasi-solutions could drag an agency responsible for an original
improvement into extended conflict with another public body or bodies. The
environmental history of the Thames and the London region illustrates the
point. Following the crisis on the river in – the year of the so-called ‘Great
Stink’
20
– the Metropolitan Board of Works constructed an intercepting sewage
system for the capital which deposited semi-deodorised effluent at downriver
outlets at Crossness and Barking. From the late s on, the inhabitants of the
latter community became convinced that they were being poisoned by sewage
vapour. These, and similar, complaints during the next twenty years further
weakened an already insecure relationship between the Metropolitan Board and
another body, the Thames Conservancy Board, which held formal responsibil-
ity for the state of the river between Staines and the sea. In this instance, as in
many others, displacement destroyed cooperation between agencies responsible
for the smooth running of local self-government in Victorian and Edwardian
Britain, redoubled tensions between town, country and suburbia and laid bare
Bill Luckin
18
C. Flick, ‘The movement for smoke abatement in nineteenth-century Britain’, Technology and
Culture, (), .
19
C. Hamlin, ‘Providence and putrefaction: Victorian sanitarians and the natural theology of health
and disease’, Victorian Studies, (–), . See also J. F. Brenner, ‘Nuisance law and the
industrial revolution’, Journal of Legal Studies, (), –.
20
T. F. Glick, ‘Science, technology and the urban environment: the Great Stink of ’, in L. J.
Bilsky, ed., Historical Ecology (Port Washington, ), pp. –; and B. Luckin, Pollution and
Control (Bristol, ), pp. –.
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in the starkest possible detail the full potential volatility of the politics of pollu-
tion. It also juxtaposed the static, locality-based characteristics of existing
methods for the prevention of environmental deterioration against the dynamic
and ever-shifting realities of pollution in an industrialising society.
(ii)
Nothing, except perhaps political dissidence or ingratitude on the part of the
working classes, was more loathsome to the Victorian and Edwardian social elites
than sewage.
21
This detestation of matter out of place, together with the near-
collapse of traditional, semi-voluntary and contract-based methods of disposal,
went hand-in-hand during the s and earlier s with widespread fear of
potential urban implosion. Within less than a generation, however, the panic-
motivated reformist programme, associated with the Chadwickian sanitary idea,
and predicated on a vision of synchronised interaction between public water
supply and sewage disposal systems, would be subjected to intense criticism.
22
Rivers that had scarcely been able to sustain salmon at the beginning of the
century were, by the s, being compared to open sewers. Only a minority
of medical men and epidemiologists were yet fully converted to the germ theory
of disease. But the unbearable stench of ever larger numbers of the nation’s
watercourses convinced contemporaries that it was unlikely that there were no
connections at all between river pollution and devastating epidemics of cholera,
typhoid and diarrhoea. The geographical spread of the water closet, which
would have continued to play a central role in Chadwick’s flawed system for the
repurification of great towns and cities, has frequently been held responsible for
this first national crisis of the rivers. But recent research points to different and
more complex sets of chronologies and explanations. Topographical conditions,
interacting with divergent accounts of the seemingly indefinitely flexible mias-
matic theory of disease, legitimated the adoption of a bewildering range of envi-
ronmental solutions. In addition, institutional and economic constraints dictated
that nearly every urban centre between the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth
centuries was characterised by subtly different relationships between water
supply, sewage disposal and preferred domestic sanitary technology. Focusing on
the last of these variables, Anthony Wohl has identified ‘three stages. The first
Pollution in the city
21
Douglas, Purity and Danger; C. Hamlin, ‘Edward Frankland’s career as London’s official water
analyst –: the context of “previous sewage contamination”’, Bulletin of the History of
Medicine, (), –; Hamlin, ‘Providence and putrefaction’; and R. L. Schoenwald,
‘Training urban man’, in Dyos and Wolff, eds., Victorian City, vol. , pp. –.
22
R. A. Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement – (London, ), ch. ;
C. Hamlin, ‘Edwin Chadwick and the engineers, –: systems and anti-systems in the
pipe-and-brick sewers war’, Technology and Culture, (), –; and G. Davison, ‘The city
as a natural system: theories of urban society in early nineteenth-century Britain’, in D. Fraser
and A. Sutcliffe, eds., The Pursuit of Urban History (London, ), pp. –.
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