The campaigner against pollution – 200 years ago
Anna Seward was an early critic of the detrimental impact of industry on the landscape and air
KIDDERMINSTER Historical Society’s next talk will be given by society president, Malcolm Dick, whose presidential lecture is on the subject of ‘Pollution and Industry: Visual and Written Perceptions in the eighteenth and nineteenth Century West Midlands’.
It will take place at 7.30pm on Wednesday March 8, and non-members are also very welcome.
Veronica Bradley, on behalf of the society, told the Bugle: “Industrialisation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was largely synonymous with progress. Its damaging effects only became widely understood in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
“Pollution, however, in the sense that we understand it, was first used by the Lichfield poet, Anna Seward in the late eighteenth century. She was an early critic of the detrimental impact of industry on the landscape and the air we breathe, especially on her beloved Severn Valley.
“This presentation explores the different ways in which Seward and other artists, writers and observers of the impact of industry – in the Ironbridge Gorge, Birmingham, the Black Country and Wyre Forest – represented what they saw and considers their attitudes to economic change.
“There are origins of our contemporary concern about climate change which we can date to over 200 years ago.”
Dr Malcolm Dick is Associate Professor in Regional and Local History and Director of the Centre for West Midlands History at the University of Birmingham.
Between 2002 and 2004, he led the project which created the Revolutionary Players website: www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk on the history of the West Midlands during the Industrial Revolution. Since then, Malcolm has published books on Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton and James Watt, as well as histories of Birmingham and the Black Country.
In 2019 he was awarded an OBE for ‘outstanding services to history in the West Midlands.’
This will be the penultimate meeting in Kidderminster Historical Society’s 20222023 programme. The final meeting will take place on Thursday March 23 at 2.15pm when Alan Godfrey will give a talk entitled ‘Rowland Hill – Genius and Benefactor.’
Next season’s programme will commence in October 2023.
Both Wednesday evening meetings which start at 7.30pm, and Thursday afternoon meetings starting at 2.15pm, are held at The Museum of Carpet, Stour Vale Mill, Green Street, Kidderminster DY10 1AZ.
There is a small charge for visitors who are very welcome.
More information about the Society can be found on the website: kdahs.org