Description of Coketown from Hard Times
Charles Dickens

          It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had
          allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted
          face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable
          serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a
          black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building
          full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the
          piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant
          in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one
          another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally
          like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the
          same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday
          and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

          These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was
          sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over
          the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who
          could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary,
          and they were these.

          You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious
          persuasion built a chapel there- as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had
          done- they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this only in highly
          ornamented examples) a bell in a bird-cage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the
          New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four
          short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted
          alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the
          infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or
          anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.
          Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere
          in the immaterial