a time, not so long ago, when people in Britain’s cities and suburbs woke in winter not to cock-crow or the beep of a mobile phone, but to the strident riddling with pokers of stoves, boilers and grates. The ash that fell from them was not soft and white, like wood-ash, but scraped grey clinker that had once been coal.
This was a fuel both ancient and strange. Its smell was salty and slightly spicy, of the deep earth. It had come from beds laid down in the Carboniferous and the Permian periods, dug out by miners who toiled underground half-naked. It was compacted of giant wetland ferns and towering unknown trees, pressed down so hard for so long that they became stone.
Holmes’s era was close to peak coal in Britain. In 1913, between industrial and domestic use, the country burned 287m tonnes of it, most of it from more than 1,300 deep mines. By then every chimney in London, south Wales and the northern towns had been belching coal dust for decades. Coal made the weather, as Charles Dickens described in the incomparable first chapter of “Bleak House”:
Shame on UK . Whole UK has terrible old infrastructure and building nothing in UK . UK is stopping coal . Disgusting.
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