At a time when debate on the balance between economic benefit and environmental cost has never been more political (think global warming, fracking, energy security), William Cavert offers a fresh historical perspective on London's energy and environment. Smoke has, of course, always been a part of urban life: the product of domestic heating, cooking and energy-intensive industry. But the ‘smoke of London’, which precipitated in the two centuries after 1575, was something unique and entirely new. While Paris carted in forests of firewood and Amsterdam brought in peat by canal, London used supplies of ‘seacoal’ shipped from north-east England (despite its absence from the title, the book is exclusively about coal). Newcastle coal was energy-rich but deposited an unusual density of particulates and chemical nasties in the atmosphere around those that burned it. It would hardly be a novel statement to say that the industrial revolution started in Britain, but the Brits also invented industrial-scale environmental pollution, and first attempted to manage it: ‘by the arrival of the dark Satanic mills of the nineteenth century, England's capital had over two centuries of experience wrestling with the consequences of being a fossil-fuelled city’ (p. 16). There was a time when historians though that pre-modern people were happy to wallow in unhealthy squalor. But this book shows that early modern Londoners were aware of environmental danger, and that they consciously balanced the nuisance of pollution wrought by coal against its economic benefits. As a result, ‘the smoke of London’ paradoxically signalled discomfort and ill-health, progress and prosperity.

This tension runs through the book's four thematic and broadly chronological parts. A series of brief topical introductions in the first part gives the slightly bewildering feeling of being introduced to the same argument from a number of different directions. Throughout, the book deals both with the meaning or perception of smoke as well as the lived experience of Londoners, and their attempts to mitigate and manage its effects. Different experiences of coal smoke prompted very different responses from the governors and the governed. Queen Elizabeth and her successors were all perturbed, but each had different solutions: from the regulation of brewers’ chimneys near Westminster, to the preservation of ceremonial places, and finally withdrawal from the capital's smoky atmosphere altogether. Gentlemen and aristocrats created spaces for their polite sociability in the West End, and kept out noisome smoke-producers through prudently negotiated and enforced leases. Middling tradesmen resorted to cottages and lodgings that allowed them a weekend of country air in suburban villages on London's fringe, which Cavert wryly notes would now be in Zone 2 on the Underground (p. 219). For the poor, the most serious danger lay in a lack of coal, not a surfeit. Privateering raids on the packed east-coast shipping corridor, combined with a maligned coal-producing monopoly, created eye-watering seventeenth-century price peaks, which the poor were unable to hedge by bulk buying. The fear of social disorder meant the state took extreme action, repeatedly using naval power to protect vulnerable coal shipments. London's relationship with coal was contradictory, as was royal authority: prohibition kept it away from protected symbolic places but, at the same time, the state's military power was deployed to bring as much of the filthy stuff into the capital as possible.

Readers of Urban History might wonder what this story will tell us about energy and the urban environment in general, outside London. Cavert makes no grand claim in this regard: ‘in England there was no general category of the urban. Instead, there was London and there was everywhere else’ (p. 12). Fair enough: London's energy consumption was vast, not only higher than other English cities, but also dwarfing the energy produced from peat in all Dutch cities combined. Yet by the late seventeenth century, ‘smoke became an increasingly common and legible symbol of urban life’ (p. 196), and by the nineteenth, it was almost a benchmark for other cities’ modernization and industrial development. Early modern London may have been unique for its time, but it offered an enduring model for ‘progress’ that inevitably links economic growth and political power with environmental harm.

The Smoke of London will no doubt find undergraduate as well as specialist readers: it is snappily written, meticulously and helpfully footnoted and tackles historiographical debates in a range of fields with admirable clarity. A memorable anecdote frames each chapter, and gives a window into the breadth of research that sits behind the book's key arguments. Sensitive readings of literary sources are placed in a robust economic framework. Carefully explained statistics sit alongside weird and wonderful cases from the royal courts, in a potent blend of political, scientific, economic, industrial and social history, all under the ‘environmental’ umbrella. It is a brilliant book that deserves to be widely read.