Fog (part 1) - February 2, 2012

Woke up this morning to fog. We don't get fog like they do near the ocean, but sometimes, especially when we have warm-ish moist air over ice-covered lakes, it does come on. It was pretty, and not dangerous.

I grew up thinking Sherlock Holmes and Oliver Twist walked through a London shrouded in sea mist. London is on the Thames, after all. But no, I eventually realized. It was a thick blanket of coal-smoke, mostly. Lots and lots of Englishfolk died of respiratory disease. Half of English city kids had rickets in the late 19th century, in large part because they seldom saw the sun (yeah, OK, part of that was child labor in factories, but still).

The book I'm working on, The Big Smoke, by Peter Brimblecombe (and what a great English name that is!), is supposedly centered on the 1952 smog episode that killed thousands of Londoners and was a major impetus to switching away from coal as the fuel for the city. But it is at root a history of the use of coal, and the problems that have come with using coal, since medieval times. The curse of smog came and went multiple times from the Norman Conquest on, and it really did follow the use and replacement of sulphur-heavy coal from Newcastle. People complained about the smell from the get-go; at first it was a back-up fuel for the poor, when firewood costs got too high. It was used for some industry, but not favored for brewing or any other activity where it would flavor the food.

Wonder how folks would have reacted to coal-fired pizza, popular in these parts—and the foundation of the American pizza business. It's a reminder that American cities had the same sorts of pea-soupers London was known for. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St Louis... A lot of cities were just as begrimed.

But because the London fogs have such a literary weight to them, their disappearance—and several decades of cleaning the soot-encrusted buildings they left as a legacy—is all the more dramatic. Really, in the States, the only city transformation that comes close in sheer drama is Pittsburgh. And Pittsburgh didn't have Sherlock Holmes or Charles Dickens.