Yet in a city established upon extremes, there will also be an extremity of weather. In 1090 six hundred houses, and a score of churches, were overthrown by a mighty wind. The spectacle of Bow Church rafters impaled twenty feet deep within the mud and stone of Cheapside inevitably led to demands for public penance and humiliation to avert the further wrath of God. But the pious citizens of London were not able to turn away the further calamities of their history. In 1439 there came a “grete wynd that dyd a moch harme in many placys”; it tore off the lead roof of the Grey Friars and “it blew almost dovne the ton side of the Old Change” knocking down so many “grete long trees that nether horss ne cart myght pass thorow the streete.” In 1626 “a terrible storm of Rain and hail … with a very great Thunder and Lightning” knocked down the wall of the churchyard of St. Andrew, and exposed many coffins in the crash. It says something about the attitude of Londoners to death that thereupon “the ruder sort” lifted up the lids of the coffins “to see the posture of the dead Corps lying therein.” During this storm a strange mist emerged above the turbulent waters of the Thames “in a round Circle of a good-bigness above the waters” which eventually “ascended higher and higher till it quite vanished away.” There was immediately talk of conjuring and black magic.
Pepys described the great storm of January 1666: “The wind being very furious … whole chimneys, nay, whole houses in two or three places blowed down.” In November 1703 a storm of nine hours descended upon the city- “all the ships in the river were driven ashore” and the barges smashed against the arches of London Bridge; the towers and spires of certain London churches fell to the ground, and in many areas whole houses were lifted up before falling upon the earth. “The lead on the roofs of the highest building, was rolled up like paper,” and more than twenty “night-walkers” were killed by falling chimneys or tiles. Daniel Defoe published an account of “the late Dreadful Tempest” in which he revealed that the shriek and frenzy of the wind were such that “nobody durst quit their tottering habitations for it was worst without” and “many thought the end of the world was nigh.”
Over the next sixty years London was ravaged by several hurricanes, the last being in 1790 when the copper covering of the new Stone’s Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn, “was blown off in one sheet and hung over the front like a large carpet or mainsail.” On the night of 16 October 1987, “London’s Hurricane” hit the capital. It had been preceded by two years of unnaturally cold and windy weather. In January 1987 fifteen inches of snow fell on the higher parts of London, the chimes of Big Ben stopped and the River Thames iced over from Runnymede to Sunbury; in March of that year, sands from the Sahara fell with the rain upon Morden. Then, in that October, the great wind visited the city. The balconies of high-rise flats collapsed, walls were ripped down, roofs stripped of their tiles. Market stalls were thrown through the air, and thousands of trees were destroyed by the effects of the gales.
Extraordinary climatic change is not at all unusual in London; if the city can attract plague and fire, then it also can attract tempest and earthquake. There were three earthquakes during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603), the first of which did not exceed a minute but the shock of which “was so severe that many churches and houses were much shattered and several people killed.” One of the incidental features of this catastrophe was the fact that the great bells of the city were so shaken that they began to ring of their own accord-the Westminster clock bell, for example, “spoke of itself against the hammer with shaking”-as if the city itself were heralding its own disaster. There also seems to have been some method in the mayhem; the two further earthquakes of Queen Elizabeth’s reign both occurred on Christmas Eve four years apart. The next most notable tremor occurred in February 1750 when two shocks were felt some hours apart, the second being preceded by “a strong but confused lightning darting its flashes in quick succession.” People flocked into the street, in panic that their houses were about to fall upon them, and the most powerful forces were visible and audible in the West End near St. James’s Park; here “it seemed to move in a south and north direction, with a quick return towards the centre, and was accompanied by a loud noise of a rushing wind.” So London has been visited by elemental forces, invading its central areas; the last record of such a visitation, at least notable in its effects, occurred in the spring of 1884. And then there came the fog.
CHAPTER 47
A Foggy Day
Tacitus mentions it in his account of Caesar’s invasion, so its spectral presence has haunted London from earliest times. The fog was originally generated by natural means, but soon enough the city was taking over from nature and creating its own atmosphere. As early as 1257 Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III, complained about the smoke and pollution of London and, in the sixteenth century, Elizabeth I was reported to have been “herself greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke of sea-coals.” By the sixteenth century a pall of smoke hung over the capital, and the interiors of the more affluent London houses were dark with soot. One of the contributors to Holinshed’s Chronicles noted that the number of domestic chimneys had greatly increased throughout the latter decades of the sixteenth century, and that interior smoke was considered a preventative against wood decay and a preservative of health. It is as if the city enjoyed its own darkness.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century numerous and various complaints issued from the polluted city. In 1603 Hugh Platt wrote a ballad, “A Fire of Coal-Balles,” in which he claimed that the fumes of sea coal damaged plants and buildings; seventeen years later James I was “moved with compassion for the decayed fabric of St. Paul’s Cathedral near approaching ruin by the corroding quality of coal-smoke to which it had long been subjected.” There was also the prevalent fear of fire; there can be no doubt that the sight and smell of smoke aroused instinctive fears of flame in the thoroughfares of the city.
John Evelyn, in his treatise entitled Fumifigium, or The inconvenience of the Air and the Smoak of London (1661), lamented the condition of a city covered by “a Hellish and dismal Cloud of SEA-COAL.” Here the invocation of hell is significant, as one of the first manifestations of that connection between the city and the lower depths. The dark and dismal cloak of London comes from “few funnels and Issues, belonging to only Brewers, Diers, Lime-burners, Salt and Sope-boylers and some other private trades, One of whose Spiracles alone, does manifestly infect the Aer, more than all the chimnies of London put together besides.” Here, rising with the sulphurous smoke, is the spectre of infection. The city is literally a deadly place. It is the same image conjured by a contemporary Character of England which described London as enveloped in “Such a cloud of sea-coal, as if there be a resemblance of hell upon earth, it is in this volcano in a foggy day: this pestilent smoak, which corrodes the very yron and spoils all the movables, leaving a soot on all things that it lights: and so fatally seizing on the lungs of the inhabitants, that cough and consumption spare no man.” It was in this period that in meteorological observations there emerged the incidence of “Great Stinking Fog” as well as that consistent cover of smoke which has become known as the “urban plume.” It might be said that the industrial city emerged from this terrible childbed.