The "less cleaning due to less coal" part is not something we really think much about these days, but the older limestone buildings can really show the difference. Here's a view with the old and either pressure-washed or redone wall:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wso9gae4JPsN6NaG6 and that's on a residential side street... Imagine getting your clothes slowly covered with it every time you go out.
That was one of the most striking differences I noticed when I saw a bunch of photos from c. 1970 of my hometown (Toronto). Everything that wasn't freshly painted was grubby in a way you don't see anymore here.
For some reason aesthetically I prefer the coal-covered limestone buildings. They are just pleasing to look at. So in a way I find it strangely disappointing that they get pressure washed.
Before clicking on this link I was thinking "oh yeah, I know of one such example near where I used to live in Bath". And then I clicked the link... and now I'm terrified of you.
We may have met :-) It was actually hard to find a good example on street view today - the whole centre is washed now and Cheap/Westgate aren't black for over a decade.
I live in a suburb with a power station that was converted from coal to gas in the 70s. My older neighbours have told me that they had to careful when hanging clothes out to try, lest they got so dirty that they'd have to wash them again.
Years ago (1986) I worked on a project for one of the bigger power stations in the UK. We created a digital display which showed which way the wind was blowing so they could choose which coal to burn. They had been getting complaints about the dirt on peoples line dried clothes.
That link doesn't work for me, I get an infinitely loading spinner (in the address bar, behind the overlay, it says something about intent://) and the back button doesn't work so I have to kill the browser. Probably because I'm not using official chrome or something but a foss webview browser, it pops over and disables the app I was coming from but the content never loads. Can someone translate it into a regular link, or a screenshot of the content?
There was a great picture of I think Manchester before and after a ban on wood / coal and a good cleanup, it went from black buildings to a place that looked pretty decent.
