‘An aerial slum’: Race, air pollution and the affective atmospheres of urban modernity

In this paper, I investigate the changing connections between atmospheric pollution, spectral colour, ideas of a spatially ‘modern’ built environment, and racism. In the nineteenth century, the blackening effects of air pollution were seen as creating disordered spectral colour in the city, in a manner that was sometimes associated with ideas of the physical regression and degeneration of the urban population. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, this colour disorder was more often depicted as the sign of an ‘out of joint’ temporality in which the ‘bad old’ Victorian era was haunting the present. This enabled urban reformers to advocate for planning as a force that could exorcise these spectres and instead create a clean, white and unpolluted urban environment, with a colour palette that was restrained rather than vivid. However, in the post-war context of mass immigration, this created a series of associations in which ideas of urban decay were all too easily associated with racialised blackness, with new immigrants figuring simultaneously as a blackening and blighting influence on urban neighbourhoods, and as too vivid in their sartorial colour choices to ‘belong’ within British culture.