(^80) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
housing, but middle class suburbs.^33 In 1859 Grindon described the view
over the city from neighbouring high ground: ‘the vastest mass of houses
ever heaped together by man is till only an encampment in the fields’. From
the train line near Pendleton in Salford it was possible to enjoy views across
‘broad, sweet lawns of meadow and pasture, chequered here and there with
waving corn fields’.^34 The real expansion of the city, into a continuously
built-up area some 30 kilometres north-south, and more than 20 east-west,
was a development of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same
was true of other major northern cities, such as Sheffield or Leeds, and
also of London. Although the capital’s population rose from around half
a million in 1650 to some 2.3 million in 1850, its continuously built-up
area still extended over less than 50 square kilometres, a fraction of its
modern extent (Figure 29).^35 To the south, the villages of Lewisham and
Streatham, although suburbanized, were still on the edge of open country.
To the north west the continuous streets of houses ended at Highgate; places
like Edgware, Harrow and Willesden were separate village surrounded by
fields.^36 In all, it is unlikely that truly urban and industrial land exceeded 2
per cent of England’s surface area in c.1860. Here, the environment does,
indeed, appear to have become significantly degraded by industry, and in
particular by the scale of both industrial and domestic coal use. But most of
figure 16 William Williams’ ‘Afternoon View of Coalbrookdale’ (Shropshire)
of 1777, showing smoke rising from furnaces set in a resolutely rural, pastoral
environment. The impact of industry on the landscape before the middle decades of
the nineteenth century was more limited than we often assume.
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