The Failure Of London In The Late 19th Century

In 1952, London was a struggling city. It was part of a nation grappling to stay in the front of the world stage. Britain was a shadow of the former global power that it had been only a few decades ago. War had taken an empire where the sun never set, and confined it to a small island in the cold northern Atlantic ocean. The British economy was choking, now lacking the fiscal backing of all its former colonies. However, during December of 1952, the city of London was quite literally strangled. A toxic mixture of sulphur dioxide, metal fibers, coal, smoke, and fog set in to encompass London in the biggest “pea souper” it had ever seen. For five days, from the 5th to the 9th, the people of London lived in a thick, gritty, smog like they had
However, there were adversaries to this new environmental movement. Winston Churchill and his conservative cabinet members worked to try to cover the incident up, and were not entirely unsuccessful. This coverup was an attempt to avoid further damage to the reputation of both London, and the United Kingdom, which had fallen on hard times since the War. Iain Macleod, who was the Minister of Health, and Harold Macmillan, the Minister of Housing and Local Government pushed to try and make the smog seem as little an incident as possible. They were the ones to move the cutoff date in order to lessen the amount of fog related casualties. Initially, the Ministry of Health put out the statistic that 531 people had died from the fog. When faced with inquiry about all the excess deaths, they were simply passed off as due to the cold or pre existing medical
Visibility was reduced to five yards, which led to several car and train accidents. There were several deaths, and a double decker bus overturning even sent forty-one miners to the hospital. While the 1956 fog can be considered a failure of the Clean Air Act’s true effect on the environment, it is important to consider that the laws contained in the Act had only been implemented in the previous summer. People simply hadn’t had enough time to abide to the new regulations the Act placed on utilities such as chimneys and furnaces. Because of this, smoke emissions had not dropped too much since 1952, leading to the second, much smaller,