Similarly, she convincingly argues that “in the widespread debate about coal exhaustion in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, speculative fiction came to depict energy transition as a source of social transformation” (150). Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. The two greatest industrial strikes of the 20th century - both detailed here - were both about coal.

It symbolised a hope for a brighter, cleaner future, making after-dark streets available to respectable people and allowing everyone to see where they were going. And in the minds of those who did think about it, the suffering was more or less a necessary evil – because, as Orwell himself put it, “the machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal”.Mines were horrible places and miners were, except during a brief period between the successful strikes of the early 1970s and the failed one of 1984–5, poorly paid. Railways and steamships eroded distances; year-round warmth and light made previously unusable time productive for both work and leisure purposes. In Mike Leigh’s film High Hopes, the disappearance of coal is used as a metaphor for the rise of the rootless, yuppie society of the 1980s.

Starting with the coal ships that brought thousands of tons of the stuff from Newcastle to 17th-century London, he describes how it drove the industrial revolution, how it fuelled locomotives and battleships, how lighting from coal-gas transformed streets and homes, and how collieries sprang up all over the country, employing at their peak more than a million men.It powered the industrial revolution, turned Britain into the first urban nation and is the industry that made almost all others possible. His speech is slurred (I know he is ill), and he suffers the journalist fetish of EMPHASising random SYLLABLES as if this added MEANING to the prose (it doesn't).