Adventurous Vents: A Journey through the Ventilation Shafts of Britain sounds like it might be a gag book in the subgenre started by Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards (1999), in which a topic of mind-numbing mundanity is given an ironic celebration. The title makes people chuckle – I know, I tested it. But if Boring Postcards had been truly mind-numbing it would never have succeeded. Its secret was that its apparent mundanity was richly textured and revealing, and so it is with Adventurous Vents. 

Authors Lucy Lavers, Judy Ovens and Suzanna Prizeman do not do any John McClane-style spelunking in this photographic journey, but this is a book that invites the reader to look beyond the surface nonetheless. For centuries, miners have known about pockets of dangerous gas, or ‘bags of foulness’, that could accumulate in their pits. These came in many forms and were called ‘damps’, an evocative word taken from the German Dämpfe, meaning vapours. Whitedamp, containing carbon monoxide, was insidious and deadly; firedamp, containing methane seeping from exposed coal, was explosive. There were also afterdamp, chokedamp, blackdamp and stinkdamp. Dust could be deadly too, and mines could become horribly hot. These hazardous accumulations had to be removed and fresh air brought in. Ventilation shafts were the answer. 

As more reasons were found to delve into the earth, ventilation shafts multiplied. The examples in Adventurous Vents are arranged chronologically, but this also loosely sorts them by function, showing successive eras of excavation. We start in 18th-century mines, and then travel into Victorian railway tunnels and sewers, where coal