The air that we Air quality is one of Londoners’ top concerns, but this isn’t the first time we have faced the dangers of polluted air.
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ate last year, the inner South London coroner highlighted the dangers of vehicle-based pollution in London in his ruling that air pollution was the root cause of Lewisham schoolgirl Ella Kissi-Debrah’s 2013 death.
Lordship Lane 1950
But, like many things in London, air pollution and its negative effects is nothing new. It’s been a fact of life in the capital for centuries. King Edward I laid down the first restrictions on burning coal in London in 1306, although they were quickly reversed. The first person to suggest that pollution could shorten Londoners’ lives was the famous diarist John Evelyn in his 1661 work Fumifugium, which he presented to King Charles II. The Industrial Revolution of the mid-18th to early 19th centuries created an enormous surge in the use of coal; for new steam-powered factories and transport, new industrial buildings like the Famers chemical works in Kennington (which gave its name to Farmers Road), and for the huge influx of residents to London, whose population increased by 500% in the century between 1801 and 1901. Later, coal-fired electric power plants, like Battersea and Bankside, became another major industrial polluter.
The results didn’t go unnoticed: the first reported London smog event – the “London particular” or “pea-souper” described by Dickens and Conan Doyle that gave the capital the nickname “Old Smoke” – was in December 1813, and a parliamentary select committee found that exposure to smoke harmed health six years later. By the mid-1850s, the Smoke Nuisance Abatement Acts gave police the power to action against industrial and commercial producers of noxious smoke, and the Alkali Acts of 1863 and 1874 more heavily regulated industries that produced the especially-damaging hydrochloric acid in their waste smoke. In 1899, the London County Council and the metropolitan boroughs inherited the police’s smoke nuisance abatement powers. However, these acts did not apply to the vast majority of London’s smoke – 95% at the start of the 20th century – came from the open coal fires that heated London’s homes: domestic smoke entered the atmosphere much lower than its industrial counterpart, and was totally unregulated.
Mint Street 1954
Thamesside from Southwark Bridge
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southwark.gov.uk
This hodge-podge of smoke and legislation turned to disaster in a handful of days in early December 1952. A persistent area of high pressure centred on southern England had brought with it clear skies, colder than usual temperatures – causing Londoners to burn more coal – and very little wind. This created a temperature inversion, where air closer to the ground was colder than that above and prevented from rising. The final straw was London’s weather in the early hours of Friday, 5 December 1952: clear skies, light winds, and moist air at ground level. As the ground cooled off without a blanket of clouds to keep its heat in, the moisture in the air condensed, causing fog to form. The light winds propelled this fog upward, forming a 100-200m deep fog layer full of London’s smoke. The sheer amount of trapped smoke meant that the sun never reached the ground to dispel the fog.
