Building on my graduate training in the history of medicine and the environment, I am currently working on a new project – funded by the Leverhulme Trust – that spans these fields.
National Coal Board leaflet for schoolchildren (1970s)
This new book is currently titled The Ends of Coal and explores British coal’s impacts and legacies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas existing histories typically map the ‘rise and fall’ of coal, I follow the lesser-known ‘ends’ of coal, interrogating its longer-term consequences for the landscape, health and population, the emergence of environmentalism, political economy, as well as empire and decolonisation. From Victorian coaling stations in the Caribbean, to the state’s attempts to repair the industrial past during the mid-twentieth century, to the replacement of coal fires with central heating systems in people’s homes during the 1970s, to the health legacies that still blight mining communities, The Ends of Coal provides a new account of what happened to a resource that had previously enabled Britain to become the first industrial nation and to command a global empire.
