Graphic detail | Why east has least

The legacy of Victorian-era pollution still shapes English cities

A new study uses 21st-century wizardry to solve a 19th-century mystery

THE EAST END of London was long an epitome of industrial squalor. Today its smokestacks are gone, but it remains the city’s poorest area. This lopsided distribution of poverty is typical in England, where the western halves of metropolitan areas tend to be richer than the eastern ones.

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What accounts for this pattern? In London the most intuitive reason is the River Thames. Historically, it carried wastewater from west to east, and its banks downstream from the city centre were lined with docks, which might have drawn low-earning workers to the area. But if the river were the cause, fluvial currents would probably point towards rough parts of other cities too. Instead, the east is poorer even in Bristol and Manchester, where rivers flow west. A newly published paper, by Stephan Heblich, Alex Trew and Yanos Zylberberg, argues instead that wind was the culprit, by blowing air pollution east and causing the rich to flee in the opposite direction.

To solve a 19th-century mystery, their study used 21st-century wizardry. First, it applied an image-recognition algorithm to maps of 70 English cities in 1880-1900, pinpointing the sites of 5,000 industrial chimneys. Next, using census and baptism data, it estimated labourers’ average skill levels over time in 5,500 local areas. By 1881 chimneys were often ringed by working-class homes. Before coal power, the low-skilled share of those areas was unremarkable.

But which came first, the factories or the proletariat? To find an answer, the authors drew concentric circles around each smokestack, and measured the share of working-class labourers in different parts of each ring, which all had similar travel times to a given factory. They also used atmospheric-dispersion models to estimate where each chimney’s exhaust would wind up, based on local topography.

In 1817 low-skilled workers were evenly spread around these rings. But by 1881 they clustered in the direction of the prevailing wind, which carried noxious fumes. This implies either that factory staff moved into newly polluted areas, or that richer people fled them. And because English winds tend to blow from the south-west, these areas were mostly north-east of the chimneys.

This pattern is remarkably durable. Among otherwise similar regions of a city like Manchester, the share of blue-collar workers in 2011 was 16 percentage points higher in areas in the top decile of pollution in 1880-1900 than in those in the bottom decile. House prices were 40% lower. England cut back on coal decades ago, but Victorian smog casts a long shadow.

Source: “East-side story: historical pollution and persistent neighbourhood sorting”, by S. Heblich, A. Trew and Y. Zylberberg, 2021, Journal of Political Economy

This article appeared in the Graphic detail section of the print edition under the headline "Why east has least"

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