Anice story has it that when Queen Victoria made the short rail journey from Birmingham to Wolverhampton a century and more ago, the royal train was fitted with heavy curtains. The monarch, her courtiers decreed, must be spared the sight of the soot-drenched smokestacks and glowing furnaces that spoke to Britain’s place as the workshop of the world.

England’s Black Country was a crucible for the 19th-century explosion in international trade that followed the industrial revolution. Victoria, Empress of India as well as Queen of Britain and Ireland, owed her dominion to this industrial sprawl. No need to offend her, though, with its blackened ugliness.