![]() Public health was vastly improved flora and fauna that had all but vanished from urban places by the 1950s began to flourish and the grand architecture of Britain's cities was no longer obscured beneath a thick layer of soot and grime. The act was truly revolutionary, representing a major global milestone in environmental protection. Some even celebrated air pollution as a tangible measure of Britain's industrial vitality, while the blazing coal fire, with all its cosy connotations of ‘home and hearth’, was a luxury few were prepared to give up. “In Britain’s coal-fuelled cities, smoke was tolerated for more than a century as a trade-off for jobs and home comforts,” says environmental historian Dr Stephen Mosley. It also marked something of a turning point: until then, people had accepted smog as a necessary evil. Official estimates at the time put the number of fatalities at 4,000 – more civilian casualties than were caused by any single incident during the war – while recent research suggests that it may have caused as many as 12,000 deaths.Īlthough ‘pea-soupers’, as the smogs were known, had been an unavoidable feature of Britain's major cities for more than a hundred years, the Great Smog of 1952 was the worst. But while the smoke would normally disperse into the atmosphere, an anticyclone hanging over the region created an inversion – trapping the pollution close to the ground and leading to the formation of a sulphurous, toxic shroud that would blanket the capital for the next five days.īefore the weather conditions changed and the smog retreated, thousands had died. On that cold, clear day in 1952, Londoners huddled around their coal fires for warmth.
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