In his book " The Road to Wigan Pier ", George Orwell described life for the unemployed in northern England during the depression : " Several hundred men risk their lives and several hundred women scrabble in the mud for hours . . . searching eagerly for tiny chips of coal in slagheaps so they could heat their own homes.
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In " Letter to Lord Byron " he rejects the Lake District idyll of William Wordsworth in favour of a decisive if irony-tinged commitment to the contemporary urban landscape of the Midlands, declaring " Clearer the Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on / The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton "; before continuing " Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery / That was, and still is, my ideal scenery ".
