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 and a Hallsworth Fellowship – 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 empire, to the state’s attempts to repair the landscape scars of the industrial past, to the plastics made from coal by-products, 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.
