The Great Fog or Great Smog of London in December 1952 caused widespread issues across the British capital for 5 days. It led to practically zero visibility and led to many health problems and events canceled. Chuck Lyons explains.
Nelson's Column, London in the Great Smog of 1952. Source: geograph.org.uk, available here.
For five days in December 1952, the city of London was paralyzed by what has come to be known as the Great Fog, a smog so dense that people were blinded, driving was all but impossible, and aboveground public transport and ambulance services stopped. Concerts and sporting events were cancelled; motion picture theaters closed. At railroad crossings, percussion caps were placed on the tracks so trains running over them caused explosions to warn passersby of their approach. Roads were littered with abandoned cars. Crime increased as burglars took advantage of the unexpected cover. Animals at the annual Smithfield Animal Show had to be given oxygen, others died. Ducks were killed when they flew blindly into the sides of buildings.
People were disoriented clinging to buildings so they wouldn’t lose their way.
And worse.
Government medical reports later estimated the fog had killed 4,000 people, an estimate that more recent investigators have upped to as many as 12,000. Another 100,000 or more were made ill with respiratory ailments, crowding the city’s hospitals or suffering and dying quietly in their homes. City officials only became aware of the deaths and the full extent of the health crisis when they noticed the city’s supply of coffins had come close to being exhausted.
“You had this swirling like somebody had set a load of car tires on fire," mortician’s assistant Stan Cribb recalled. On Friday Dec. 5, Cribb was driving in the lead of a funeral procession as the smog settled in, the sky darkened, and he realized he was losing sight of the curb beside the road. After a few minutes, Cribb’s employer got out of the car and walked in front with a light, but even that did not help much.
"It's like you were blind," says Cribb.
Nightfall
By nightfall visibility had dropped to a few feet, and it got no better on Saturday. It became even thicker Sunday and again on Monday. Visibility had been reduced in places to one foot, and people reported they could not see their own shoes. In the Isle of Dogs section of the city, visibility was officially recorded as “nil.” People carried lanterns and white clothes to make themselves visible on the sidewalks, and some took to wearing makeshift masks of gauze or fabric to aid their breathing. The smog by then had penetrated theaters that were closed when patrons complained they were unable to see the stage, into homes, churches, and hospitals.
“The air was not simply thick and grey. It was yellow, sulfurous, and impenetrable,” an unnamed London resident later wrote. “I heard the footsteps of a person walking toward me and realized that my own hesitant walking also sounded on the pavement. As we approached each other we both almost stopped for we could not see each other. Then, five feet in front of me a man materialized out of the smog with a mask over his nose and mouth. Wordlessly we passed each other.”
At its peak, the Times of London reported, the fog spread about twenty miles in all directions from the center of the city.
The Great Fog
The Great Fog, like most London smog, had been caused by particles from the smoke of the city’s coal-burning furnaces combining in the atmosphere with particles from the area’s natural fog. But in 1952, a third element was added: a weather inversion, a high-pressure system that trapped cold and polluted air underneath warmer air and held it in place where it grew progressively worse. (Historians have also noted that a cold turn in the weather before December 5 had people burning more coal to keep warm while the coal used in the post-war period had a higher sulfur content, both of which added to the already-existing pollution).
It was not until 2016, however, that science discovered what exactly had caused the deaths, In November of that year the results of a study conducted by scientists from the United Kingdom, China, and the United States and headed by Renyi Zhang, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University, concluded that sulfuric acid particles, formed from the sulfur dioxide in the coal smoke, was the culprit. Breathing them could be—and was—deadly.
By the time the study was published, London residents had been suffering from bad air for eight centuries, since coal was first burned there in the 1200s. Periods of smog, known to the locals as “pea-soupers” had by the 16th century become such a problem that King James I tried unsuccessfully to limit coal burning. By the 19th and 20th centuries these dense, yellowish fogs, made worse by the coal burning factories of the Industrial Revolution, had become regulars on the city’s streets appearing almost as living entities in the London writings of Charles Dickens, swirling around Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street, and in modern times filling the screens of eerie and suspenseful black-and-white motion pictures.
“Fog everywhere,” Dickens had written in his 1853 novel Bleak House. “Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky...as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.”
The end
By the mid-20th century, though many of the factories had by then moved out of the city, the exhausts of automobiles, trucks, and buses were adding more pollutants to the already polluted air.
Then came December 1952.
The end came to the Great Fog—and at it would turn out to most of London’s fog problem—on Tuesday, Dec. 9, when a fresh wind came in from the west and blew the smog free of the inversion, away from London, and out over the North Sea where it dispersed. But, besides its immediate and disastrous effects, the Great Fog had had another effect. It also made the public aware of the dangers of pollution and led to the Clean Air Act of 1956 that limited the burning of coal in urban areas of the United Kingdom. Some historians have additionally called the public’s reaction to the city’s 1952 fog as the beginning of the environmental movement.
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