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As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does not notice much difference until you are beyond Birmingham. In Coventry you might as well be in Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham is not unlike Norwich Market, and between all the towns of the Midlands there stretches a villa-civilization indistinguishable from that of the South. It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of industrialism— an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.
A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless. It is something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant’s dust-bin. On the outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and over-head the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country. Often the slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the red rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the slow-moving blue flames of sulphur, which always seem on the point of expiring and always spring out again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does ultimately, only an evil brown grass grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface. One in the slums of Wigan, used as a playground, looks like a choppy sea suddenly frozen; ‘the flock mattress’, it is called locally. Even centuries hence when the plough drives over the places where coal was once mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will still be distinguishable from an aeroplane.
I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan.
All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north,
through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you
could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke.
The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud,
criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round,
as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the
‘flashes’—pools of stagnant water that had seeped
into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was
horribly cold. The ‘flashes’ were covered with ice the
colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in
sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from
which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke,
shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. But even Wigan is beautiful
compared with Sheffield. Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim
to be called the ugliest town in the Old World: its inhabitants,
who want it to be pre-eminent in everything, very likely do make
that claim for it. It has a population of half a million and it
contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian
village of five hundred. And the (...)
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