London’s Pea-Souper of 1952

With the Canadian fires contributing to horrific air pollution in areas as far south as the Carolinas, as well as the recent Trump-dominated US Supreme Court decision that limits the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate clean water, the effects of pollution in our lives are of pressing importance. It’s worth remembering an episode in London’s history called “The Great Smog,” which killed thousands of people in the fateful winter of 1952.

This wasn’t even a century ago — by the mid-1900s, London had had a working sewage removal system, and the “miasma” theory of contagion (i.e. that smells spread sickness) had long been disproven. Nevertheless, from December 5 to the 9th the fog that formed — always an issue in London, cut through by the river Thames — turned the coal smoke that the inhabitants were relying on for heating their buildings in that particularly cold winter into a deadly acid.

The polluted smogs had been called “pea-soupers,” but this one was much worse than any before. This image captures the lack of visibility in those days. Public transportation had to stop, and indoor public events like movie screenings were cancelled because even vision inside buildings was so obscured.

The smog turned into a lethal substance — because of a weather inversion and the timing of the water evaporation, the awful sulphur dioxide from the coal burners was transformed into sulphuric acid — that stuff can burn skin on contact, so breathing it in was deadly. Well over 100,000 Londoners sickened, and although initial statistics put the human casualties at 4,000, later estimates amounted to more like 12,000. Cattle in surrounding fields were said to have died from it.

Britain’s government, being a democracy, immediately oversaw legislation for Clean Air Acts. The problems with London’s air quality still exist, but nowhere to the extent they did in the Great Smog of 1952.