The indusTrial revoluTion^77motive power. And it became, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the main form of domestic fuel in England, replacing wood, peat,
gorse and the rest, with major implications for the various habitats which
produced these materials. Lastly, coal was a bulk commodity, valuable but
expensive to transport, and its gradual adoption as the principal source of
heat and energy throughout England would have been impossible without
major improvements in transport infrastructure. While it is true that the
more general growth of the economy demanded better forms of transport,
the development of a more sophisticated communications infrastructure
seems largely to have been stimulated by the needs of coal producers.
At the start of the period covered by this book most roads appear to
have been in a poor condition, and they deteriorated further as the volume
of traffic, resulting from commercial and industrial expansion, steadily
increased. Even the most important highways were maintained by the
parishes through which they ran. Each was solely responsible for its own
section, regardless of its population and resources, and regardless of the
amount of traffic the road in question had to bear.^15 This continued to be
the case for minor local roads until the later nineteenth century. But from
the late seventeenth century major routes began to be improved through the
institution of ‘turnpike trusts’. Created by individual acts of parliament,
these bodies would adopt sections of road, erect toll gates, charge tolls and
use the proceedings (after a suitable cut had been taken as profit) to keep the
route in adequate repair.^16 Even improved roads, however, were insufficient
for moving heavy loads like coal: for this, water transport was required.
Navigable rivers had been key arteries of commerce since the Middle Ages,
and many were ‘improved’ in various ways – with the installation of simple
staunch locks, for example – in the course of the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. But this network was massively extended from the
1750s, beginning with the construction of the Bridgewater canal (designed
to serve the coal mines at Worsley), ‘the movement reaching a crescendo in
the ‘mania’ of 1789–93’.^17 The need to transport coal also encouraged, as
much as powered, the spread of the rail network from the 1830s. Coal thus
lay at the heart of the industrial revolution, and industrialization was, above
all, a transition to a fossil fuel economy. Indeed, as Wrigley has observed,
if coal had not existed England would, by 1815, have required at least
6 million hectares of managed woodland to meet its energy requirements –
nearly half its total land area.^18
industry and wildlife
On the face of it, the impact of industrialization on England’s ecology, and
on its wildlife, might appear straightforward. ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ brought
pollution to the atmosphere and watercourses, especially as the spread of
the canal network, and the increasing use of coal as the main industrial fuel,