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Bold of you to assume that wouldn't have just resulted in a coal burning power station every couple kilometers...
At first, absolutely yes, coal smoke everywhere, creating an untenable crisis within the cities themselves. That type of crisis would have been tackled as a priority, would have been an integral part of the loudest political dialogues and arguments, decades ago.
They already had coal pollution everywhere. And they had a solution for that.
Which was "make the poor people live in the path of the smoke".
That can't be done as easily if you have a power plant every mile or so. The issue would affect everyone to some extent, rich and poor. That would have been the issue with Direct Current, it would have been impossible to keep it out of sight and out of mind.
Most of those would be small though. Like the size of a small factory. And most people in the UK would have had plenty of those within a mile of their house, right up until we offloaded all our manufacturing to China.
Even a full sized coal plant isn't objectionably dirty enough that people would demand an alternative. We only moved mostly to gas because it was cheaper (and that's where renewables will eventually win again). There's one less than two miles from my house. It would be nice if it wasn't there, but the air is far from unbreathable. If a small coal plant every few miles was the price of having electricity, people would put up with it.