West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London's Industrialized Marshland, 1839–1914(Nature | History | Society)

During the nineteenth century, London's population grew by more than five million as people flocked from the countryside to the city to take up jobs in shops and factories. In West Ham and the River Lea, Jim Clifford explores the growth of London's most populous independent suburb and the degradation of its second largest river, bringing to light the consequences of these developments on social democracy and urban politics in Greater London. Drawing on Ordnance Surveys and archival materials, Jim Clifford uses historical geographic information systems to map the migration of Greater London's industry into West Ham's marshlands and reveals the consequences for the working-class people who lived among the factories. He argues that an unstable and unhealthy environment fuelled protest and political transformation. Poverty, pollution, water shortages, infectious disease, floods, and an unemployment crisis provided an opening for a new urban politics to emerge. By exploring the intersection of pollution, poverty, and instability, Clifford establishes the importance of the urban environment in the development of social democracy in Greater London at the turn of the twentieth century.

About the Author :
Jim Clifford is an associate professor of environmental history in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. He has been a fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society and a postdoctoral fellow with the Trading Consequences project funded by Digging Into Data grant. He has a number of publications on advanced digital history methods and is a founding editor of ActiveHistory.ca, which received the 2015 Canadian Historical Association Public History Prize.

Review :
West Ham, Clifford shows, was beset by intersecting social, administrative, technical, and environmental problems, and their consequences were felt quite unequally … Such nuance and detail is perhaps this book's major contribution. - William M. Calvert, The University of St. Thomas (Environmental History) Clifford draws welcome attention to part of Greater London frequently neglected in historical scholarship due to its proximity to London yet independent status … West Ham and the River Lea provides a view of the social and environmental impacts of West Ham's industrialization with an emphasis on the sanitary experiences of people living in the borough during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. - Nicola Tynan, Dickinson College (London Journal)