London Smog

When the yellow pea soup of London's famous fog came up in two different books I was reading this weekend (Neverwhere, Niel Gaiman and Thunderstruck, Erik Larson), I had to look into the phenomenon.

The most interesting article I found on the web was from the EPA. The EPA was less interested in yellow pea soup as grounds for creepy historical ambiance than as an early environmental crisis. London's noxious fog was produced by burning soft sea coal- a cheap alternative to burning wood (or later, the harder anthracite coal). The soft sea coal gave off about as much smoke as it did heat, and belched out the chimneys of homes and factories to blend with the hovering water vapor, and coat the city in thick, yellow smog that sometimes lurked for days.

The EPA article cites London's first environmental legislation at 1272, when King Edward I banned the use of sea coal literally on pain of death. But the EPA article points out that by then wood was scarce (forests had already been plundered to build the city and to heat its dense population's wood burning stoves), and because wood was scarce, it was expensive. Despite the fact that Edward actually had the first sea coal-burning offender put to death, folks kept on using sea coal. See, the king couldn't kill the whole swarm Londonders who didn't have the money to keep warm any other way. The pressure of their need and numbers overrode environmental legislation, and continued to do so until 1952, when a four day immersion in yellow pea soup killed about 4,000 people.

The deaths, the phenomenon of indigent children hired to light a pedestrian's way through the fog, and the pea soup nickname, have become a way for modern writers to evoke the ambiance of London's past. But imagine living through that smog. Imagine being Tolkien, imagine being Shakespeare (The EPA article points out that Shakespeare lived through these fogs, and its influence is evidenced by Macbeth's witches: "fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air"). Pea-soupers weren't some quirky phenomenon from the past, they were the smelly smoke of poverty, of deprivation and environmental catastrophe that you could taste on your tongue, wipe from your skin. It settled in your clothes and hair, penetrated lungs and brought out great coughing wads of mucous. It was the cost of building a great city, and the cost of surviving there and maintaining a decent standard of living.