A view from my window

"IT WAS A TOWN OF RED BRICK, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke had allowed it. It was a town of machines and tall chimneys, out of which snakes of smoke trailed forever. It had a river that ran purple with bad smelling dye. It had vast piles of buildings where there was rattling and trembling all day long and where pistons of steam engines worked up and down, like the heads of mad elephants. It contained many small streets all like one another, lived in by people like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow...'