About this Event
Join us for the next Architectural History and Theory Seminar Series of 26/27 by Aleksander Bierig.
This lecture will be hybrid. Please book your ticket for attendance in person or online. You will receive access to the online event via email the day before the event.
Abstract
The history of fossil fuels is often told as a narrative of limits and their transcendence. From its deep stores of surplus energy, coal and other fossil fuels unleashed new scales and speeds of growth in material, economic, and even demographic terms. Within architectural history, recent scholarship has explored how coal’s power generated new forms of ‘material abundance’ in nineteenth-century Britain, radically altering the construction materials, scales, forms and even tastes that emerged in a new atmosphere of plenty.
Was there any way to manage this new, materially explosive world? This talk will consider themes of growth and limits in the fossil-fueled built environment through a particular and peculiar case: the London coal tax, which was levied on all coal entering the metropolis for more than two centuries, between 1666 and 1889. Initially raised to pay for reconstruction after the Great Fire of London, the coal tax morphed into an all-purpose fund for public building by the late eighteenth century. In the absence of a central planning authority, the tax offered one of the few instruments for public construction in London, helping to pay for an array of civic monuments and infrastructural projects. As late as 1859, the coal tax was still described as ‘the sole pecuniary means of effecting metropolitan improvements’.
What did it mean to plan the city out of the fiscal residue of the coal trade? And what kind of planning (or non-planning) emerged from this complicated set of links between fossil fuel dependence, commercial geography, municipal regulation, and public construction? This paper will consider the history and significance of the coal tax, with a particular focus on the debates that arose in mid-nineteenth-century London, as the proposed continuation of the tax met new spatial, political, and economic pressures. If the coal tax generated the revenue to construct a compromised public realm, it also raised the question of what kind of planning would be possible in a world defined by fossil-fueled growth.
About Aleksander Bierig
Aleksandr Bierig studies the history of architecture and infrastructure, with a focus on intersections between the built environment, the natural environment, and political economy in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain and the Anglo-settler world. He is an Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture, Landscape, and Environment at the University of Toronto. His lecture will be taken from his current book project, Surplus Energies: Coal, Architecture, and the Production of Space in Britain, 1700–1850. The book examines a range of sites - from household fireplaces and infrastructural connections to monumental constructions - linked to the construction of the London Coal Exchange, the world's first market for fossil fuel. Focusing on a pivotal period when Britain stood apart as the planet’s primary fossil-fueled society, the project considers how coal's energy began unsettling, disrupting, and overturning previous ways of building and thinking.
Image: Map of the “Area of Taxation” for the London Coal Duty. From Theodore Wood Bunning, An Account of the Duties on Coal, and the London Coal and Wine Duties, 1883.
Access
Please let us know if you require any support accessing this event by emailing [email protected].
Please see ECA's privacy notice for more information on how your personal details provided will be used and stored.
Event venue & nearby stays
Adam House, Basement Theatre, The University of Edinburgh, 3 Chambers Street, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.