ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the case studies that draw on the community power debates of the 1960s and 1970s, and apply the theories and concepts about power, agenda control, and non-decisions to the nineteenth-century debate on smoke pollution in Stockport. The issue of smoke abatement was always a contentious one in the nineteenth century, nowhere more so than in industrial mill towns. Stockport's potential for development was further enhanced by the construction of tunnels through the soft sandstone to points upstream of the meanders of the River Goyt. In the nineteenth-century urban arena, the visible philanthropic and social role of the 'urban squirearchy' created a municipal élite who enjoyed a considerable and cumulative political advantage. Thus, the whole local political system was open to pressures and constraints from central government and that the power of local leadership was dependent on the extent to which the local political system was open to pressures from within the locality.
