London Smog

Blackleaf

Blackleaf

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Oct 9, 2004
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And how is smog coating London a new thing? Some people will be able to remember the city's Great Smog of 1952 which killed 12,000 people.

The Great Smog of London: the air was thick with apathy

The capital was famous for its filthy air long before the Great Smog of 1952 but it took the deaths of 4,000 people to prompt a clean-up. And even now the city lives under a deadly cloud of invisible pollutants

Piccadilly Circus in the smog: On the weekend that began on Friday, December 5 1952 visibility quickly dropped to five yards all over London, and on Sunday night it was officially described as “nil” Photo: HULTON GETTY


By Geoffrey Lean
06 Dec 2012
The Telegraph

'Hell,” wrote Shelley, “is a city much like London – / A populous and a smoky city”.

Never was that more true than over one terrible weekend 60 years ago. On Friday, December 5 1952, a silent, suffocating shroud settled over the capital’s streets. By the time it lifted, four days later, more than 4,000 people had lost their lives in what is still officially the world’s worst air pollution disaster.

It was the climax of a long and dirty history, full of procrastination and half-hearted attempts to clean up the smogs that were so identified with the capital that they came to be called “London’s Particular”, despite lesser incidents in Glasgow and other major cities.

That weekend was bitterly cold and Londoners stoked up their coal fires to keep warm, pushing pollution up a million chimneys to join the already foggy, stagnant air.

This hung like a pall over the city because it was trapped in a temperature inversion, with the cold caught beneath a warmer layer higher up. On the Friday the pea-souper was already thicker than anyone could remember, and it went on getting worse.

Visibility quickly dropped to five yards all over London, and on Sunday night it was officially described as “nil”. On the Monday, Sadler’s Wells had to abandon a performance of La Traviata because the audience could not see the stage, and nurses at the Royal London Hospital reported not being able to see from one end of their wards to the other.

People who had set off in their cars in what should have been daylight had to abandon them and walk, while buses gave up and crawled back to their depots in nose-to-tail convoys. Two trains collided near London Bridge. And sacking soaked in whisky was wrapped around the nostrils of cattle at the Smithfield Show to act as improvised gas masks.

The Times, in a whimsical if wrongheaded leader column, settled for smog scepticism, arguing that the phenomenon was both natural and well precedented. “The fogs are ancient Britons,” it opined. “They met the boat when the ancestors of Boadicea landed. Taking advantage of a northern island, rich in rivers and diversity of soils, they roam about on their little cat feet as freely as they did before anyone had heard of smoke abatement.” Yet levels of smoke in the air appear to have peaked at 66 times “normal” levels. The results only became apparent when undertakers reported that they were running out of coffins and florists had sold all their flowers.

Weather History: The Great Smog of 1952 - YouTube

Great Smog of London documentary - YouTube


Government medical reports in the following weeks estimated that up until 8 December 1952 4,000 people had died prematurely and 100,000 more were made ill because of the smog's effects on the human respiratory tract. More recent research suggests that the total number of fatalities was considerably greater, at about 12,000


London's smogs were known as "Pea Soupers", with by far the worst coming in 1952.




Arsenal goalkeeper Jack Kelsey peers into the fog. The "smog" was so thick the game was eventually stopped. Photograph: PA


The Great Smog - A police officer outside the Bank of England attempts to keep traffic moving through the Great Smog of London of 1952​


A poor sight: Visibility was reduced to a couple of yards with drivers not even being able to see as far as their own car headlights​


Lighting up the night: A police officer using flames at Marble Arch to direct the traffic in London​



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Glow 'ello 'ello: In these Daily Mail photographs, PC Reg Nicol is seen helping pedestrians find their way through the fog (top) and smoke pours from chimneys, into the fog that 'caught' it and turned it into smog, seen from the top of Westminster Cathedral (bottom)












 
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Nuggler

Nuggler

kind and gentle
Feb 27, 2006
11,596
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Backwater, Ontario.
Great post Blackie. Brings back memories of stories me granny told me when I was a wee laddy. She was born and raised in London town.
Being intelligent, as soon as grampa had enough lucre, they fled the country to the clean air of Canada.
I remain eternally grateful to them for that.
 
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