Coal smoke drifting through thousands of London chimneys combined with clean natural fog to make smog. A lot of its energy was spent making smoke, not heat. Sea-coal was plentiful, but it didn’t burn efficiently. Soon, Londoners were burning the soft, bituminous coal to heat their homes and fuel their factories. Large deposits of “sea-coal” off the northeast coast provided a cheap alternative. But as the city grew and the forests shrank, wood became scarce and increasingly expensive. Until the 12th century, most Londoners burned wood for fuel. Smog in London predates Shakespeare by four centuries. The smog even invaded the world of Shakespeare, whose witches in Macbeth chant, “fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.” By then, the phenomenon was part of London history, and dirty, acrid smoke-filled “pea-soupers” were as familiar to Londoners as Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. In fact, a Londoner coined the term “smog” in 1905 to describe the city’s insidious combination of natural fog and coal smoke. This led me to a fascinating article by the Environmental Protection Agency about the London fog/smogs.Īmericans may think smog was invented in Los Angeles. I wanted to learn about those historic fogs, so my next query (to find the earlier fog events) was: Readers of Sherlock Holmes cannot imagine the great detective without seeing him striding up Baker Street shrouded in eerie tendrils of fog. By the time Dickens came to write about them, he imagined dinosaurs stalking out of the mists. The city had been paralysed by swirling fogs since the Napoleonic era, 150 years earlier. While this article is about the Fog/Smog of 1952, it suggests that the pea-soup fogs of earlier times were just as bad, possibly worse, and due to the same causes.Īn article from the Daily Mail (UK) described it like this: More recent research suggests that the total number of fatalities was considerably greater, at about 12,000… Government medical reports in the following weeks estimated that until 8 December 4,000 people had died prematurely and 100,000 more were made ill because of the smog’s effects on the human respiratory tract. It lasted from Friday 5 December to Tuesday 9 December 1952, and then dispersed quickly after a change of weather.Īlthough it caused major disruption due to the effect on visibility, and even penetrated indoor areas, it was not thought to be a significant event at the time, with London having experienced many smog events in the past, so-called “pea soupers”. A period of cold weather, combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions, collected airborne pollutants mostly from the use of coal to form a thick layer of smog over the city. ….it was a severe air-pollution event that affected London during December 1952. It really was a combination of smoke and other obnoxious particulate aerosols pumped into the air, making breathing (and life itself) difficult.Īs the Wikipedia entry about The Great Smog of ’52 described it: And that’s when I learned that the famous “pea soup” fog of London is only partly true fog. This happens all the time–usually, you just add another term (that’s NOT clothing related) and the kinds of results you want will emerge. I was hoping to find some useful history about the fog, but I found that the results were completely swamped by commercial results about the London Fog clothing company. Like most SearchResearchers, I fairly quickly learned that the great historic fogs of London weren’t really fog per se.

Have the fogs of my youth (the 1960s) vanished? Is my memory wrong? Do they still have fog as often as we did when I was a kid? But I don’t see them much anymore when I visit these days. As a kid, I lived near Long Beach, California and I remember great fogs. What’s the story with the fog in London? IS London foggy? Or was it only foggy in literature? Why does London have this reputation?Ģ.

But, as many SearchResearchers found out, sometimes it’s something more than just water droplets.ġ.

Past weather conditions by date