We live 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 industrial nation’. 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. This is surprising on a number of counts. First, research programmes are frequently influenced and at times determined 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. Thirdly, writers in these fields are providing provisional answers to a crucial and essentially 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?

In what follows the literature will be surveyed in order to illuminate relationships between urban and environmental change during the period under review. An opening section outlines the social and legal processes and traditions that partially 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.