The public’s outrage was escalating. ibid.
And then the outer slums, and then the slag-heaps, belching chimneys, blast-furnaces, canals, and gasometers of another industrial town. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
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. ibid.
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 overhead the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country. ibid.
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 … nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. ibid.
Sometimes the drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry chimneys. Through the open doors of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron being hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers and the scream of the iron under the blow. ibid.
By the end of the nineteenth century Ulster’s distinctiveness was marked by its status as the most industrialised part of Ireland. The Road to Partition s1e1, BBC 2021, historian
In Cookson’s world, industry is a monstrous machine. An endless cycle of low pay, unreliable hours and sheer hard labour. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You III: Modern Victorians, BBC 2005