Climate change could hardly be described as beautiful but as Britain rapidly became industrialised in the 19th century JMW Turner painted stunning multicoloured smoggy skies and landscapes rapidly transformed by the pollution from industry and burgeoning cities. And whether he made a deliberate effort to show it, much of this art became a record of the pollution in the Industrial Revolution during his lifetime.
In The Thames Above Waterloo Bridge steamboats pump out thick grey smoke and a haze of smog hangs over London like a scene from an alien planet. It also shows the Thames swallowed up in filthy grey waters, and about the time that Turner painted this scene London suffered its first cholera outbreak in 1831-32 from drinking water polluted by sewage.
