About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
Description
West Ham and the River Lea explores the environmental and social history of London’s most populous independent suburb and its second largest river. Jim Clifford maps the migration of industry into West Ham’s marshlands and reveals the consequences for the working-class people who lived among the factories. He argues that poverty, pollution, water shortages, and disease stimulated momentum for political transformation, providing an opening for a new urban politics to emerge. This book establishes the importance of the urban environment in the development of social democracy in Greater London at the turn of the twentieth century.
Contributor Notes
Jim Clifford is an associate professor of environmental history in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. He has been a fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society and a postdoctoral fellow with the Trading Consequences project funded by Digging Into Data grant. He has a number of publications on advanced digital history methods and is a founding editor of ActiveHistory.ca, which received the 2015 Canadian Historical Association Public History Prize.
Editorial Reviews
Clifford draws welcome attention to part of Greater London frequently neglected in historical scholarship due to its proximity to London yet independent status … West Ham and the River Lea provides a view of the social and environmental impacts of West Ham’s industrialization with an emphasis on the sanitary experiences of people living in the borough during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
— London Journal
West Ham, Clifford shows, was beset by intersecting social, administrative, technical, and environmental problems, and their consequences were felt quite unequally … Such nuance and detail is perhaps this book’s major contribution.
— Environmental History
