Here’s how the fog struck the chilly city and how it still affects the United Kingdom today. It would affect British health-and its climate-for years to come. Between December 5 and 9, 1952, the environmental disaster strangled London. The terrible, choking fog had a nickname-the Great Smog. ( What is air pollution? Here are the basics.)
Soon, the hospital reached a breaking point, its morgue overflowing with patients who had died of respiratory and cardiac problems. The smog was inside the hospital where Acheson worked-and inside the lungs of his emergency-room patients. Lost on streets he knew well, the young doctor had to “creep on the pavement along the walls of the buildings, to the next corner, to read the name of the street.” He made his way back to the hospital amid what he later remembered as “eerie silence.” But while working a shift at a hospital in the bustling city center in December 1952, a routine errand turned into a disorienting-and dangerous-brush with disaster.Īn ominous fog had been filling the city, enveloping it in a dense layer of black, sooty air. It took many decades to act on the knowledge that pea-soupers cost lives.Donald Acheson knew London like the back of his hand. In Victorian times it was our love for home fires that politicians were reluctant to upset today it is our love for cars and other private means of transport. Nowadays, too, cleaner technology is available with electric cars as well as less polluting fuels for industry. Will the toxic fog Londoners are now experiencing be seen as anything other than what it really is – a dangerous, poisonous nuisance? It is much harder to romanticise now than the pea-soupers of the past. Jack the Ripper is often dramatised as pursuing his victims through the fog, but in fact his crimes took place on clear nights. It only plays an active role in one of his stories, The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, where the villain needs to dispose of a dead body out of a window on to the top of a train without being seen. In fact, his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, did not use London fog as extensively in his writings as people think. On film and on TV, Sherlock Holmes is often seen combing for clues through foggy streets. Of course, people also made a connection between fog, mystery and crime. A Japanese artist, Yoshio Markino, travelled to London to paint the fog, observing that “the harmony of its colour is most wonderful”. He “was terrified to see that there was no fog, not even the least trace of a mist” as a clear atmosphere frustrated his search for the effect.
London fog weather or not series#
Impressionist painter Claude Monet booked a room on the top floor of the Savoy hotel in the winter and produced a series of beautiful London fog paintings around the turn of the 19th century. Foreign artists saw its potential and came over to paint it. Visitors to the city complained if they did not experience the famous London fog. Pulp-fiction writers liked to use smog as a means of totally destroying life in London: “One common doom, one common sepulchre of gloomy fog, there was for the richest and the poorest, the best and the worst alike,” wrote one writer of these apocalyptic stories. Henry James, George Gissing, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad also used London fog in their works. The air, he wrote, had “flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes”. Dickens employed it in the opening pages of Bleak House to signify the obfuscations of the Court of Chancery. Writers perceived the magic and mystery of London fog and used it extensively. London fog was given a variety of romantic names such as “London ivy” by Charles Dickens or the “pea-souper”, not the green variety but the more traditional yellow potage. A coal fire blazing in the hearth meant warmth and comfort. Industrial chimneys pumping out smoke signified employment. Londoners were also proud of their smogs. It was only when gas and electricity became more affordable that legislation could be passed without incurring higher costs to the consumers. George Orwell extolled the virtues of the “old-fashioned coal fire” and complained of “the noisy minority” who wanted to do away with it. To move to cleaner fuels always meant higher costs and successive governments were reluctant to interfere with the right of domestic consumers to use the fuel they preferred. Why did it take so long? Industrial interests often prevailed. A policeman uses a flare to guide traffic during a heavy smog in London in 1952 that claimed 12,00 lives.
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