[History by Numbers] Old King Coal
Would it be a wheeze to look at the history of air pollution in Britain?
The problems of air pollution in a world choked with motor vehicles are well known. A fightback has begun – though zero emissions zones in cities have become a cultural battleground. As with so many things, this subject has a historical context, foregrounded a few years ago in an article about Victorian air pollution by Tim Hatton, professor of economics at the University of Essex.
Professor Hatton’s article can be read at http://bit.ly/2CDSLp6. In it he reflects on the impact specifically of burning coal, the fuel of both ordinary households and the rapidly expanding industrial revolution. Particulates have only been monitored since the 1920s, but a graph published by DEFRA (see https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/aqeg/ch7.pdf) shows that levels only really plummeted after the Clean Air Act of 1956. This was itself a reaction to the Great Smog of 1952, because of which as many as 4,000 people in London died within a week.
Hatton’s article in fact summarises more detailed research by American academics Brian Beach and W. Walker Hanlon in their paper ‘Coal smoke and mortality in an early industrial economy’ for The Economic Journal. Their work represents an attempt to make up for the lack of pre-1920s data by inferring coal use around Britain from other data about the industrial infrastructure and workforce. The correlation between population density and mortality has long been observed, normally attributed to poor sanitation in dense urban areas, but Beach and Hanlon content that air pollution has been overlooked as a factor.
They have produced a map, shown at the bottom of this article, which presents their estimate of coal use in the 1850s – they then compared this with mortality data across the country.