For two decades, beginning in 1985, the city worked to clean up a blighted 13-mile industrial corridor along the Tennessee River, a stretch sofilthy that motorists used to have to use their headlights during the day.
Oliver Twist also highlights the rank poverty of the inner cities - particularly when the plot moves to Jacob's Island, " the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London " where the houses were "so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor".