But perhaps the worst of all London fogs were the “smogs” of the early 1950s, when thousands died of asphyxiation and bronchial asthma. In some of the theatres the fog was so thick that the actors could not be seen upon the stage. On the afternoon of 16 January 1955 there was “almost total darkness … People who experienced the phenomenon said it seemed as if the world was coming to an end.” A Clean Air Act was passed in 1956, as a result of public disquiet, but in the following year another smog caused death and injury. Then again in the winter of 1962 a lethal smog killed sixty people in three days; there was “nil visibility” on the roads, shipping “at a standstill,” trains cancelled. A newspaper report put the facts plainly: “The amount of smoke in the London air was 10 times higher than normal for a winter day yesterday. The amount of sulphur dioxide was 14 times higher than normal.” Six years later there followed a more extensive Clean Air Act, and this legislation marked the end of London fog in its ancient form. Electricity, oil and gas had largely taken the place of coal, while slum clearance and urban renewal had reduced the level of close-packed housing.
But pollution has by no means disappeared; like London itself, it has simply changed its form. The city may now be in large part a “smokeless zone” but it is filled with carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons which together with “toxic secondary pollutants” such as aerosols can produce what is known as a “photochemical smog.” High concentrations of lead in the London air and a general increase of sunshine in the cleaner air have in turn inspired more contamination. There is a problem with ozone at ground level and the effects of “temperature inversion” mean that the emissions from traffic and power stations, for example, cannot be released into the upper atmosphere. So they linger at the level of the streets. The fog that Tacitus described in the first century AD still hovers over London.
Night and Day
A depiction by Gustave Doré of poor vagrants huddled on Westminster Bridge on a starry night in the 1870s; it was said that the number of such vagrants could fully populate an average city.
CHAPTER 48
Let There Be Light
The high death rate in London has been blamed in part upon the lack of natural light. The prevalence of rickets, for example, has been noted in this connection. It is revealed in Werner’s London Bodies that in St. Bride’s Lower Churchyard over 15 per cent of children’s skeletons, dating from the nineteenth century, showed signs of that disorder, while those who did not succumb spent their lives upon “badly bowed limbs.” So there was a yearning for light, or, rather, an instinctive need for light. If it could not be found naturally, then it must be artificially created to satisfy the appetite of the Londoner.
As early as the fifteenth century lights were established by statutory decree. In 1405 every house beside the main thoroughfare had to display a light at the Christmas watch and, ten years later, the mayor ordered that the same dwellings bear lamps or lights in the dark evenings between October and February, in the hours from dusk until nine o’clock. These lanterns were of transparent horn, rather than of glass. But medieval London remained in relative obscurity except, perhaps, for the light spread by those who carried torches to guide pedestrians or by servants who used the flare of flaming brands to accompany the passage of some great lord or cleric. In the early years of the seventeenth century “link-boys” bearing lights also became a source of brightness.
The great change in the street lighting of the capital did not occur, however, until 1685 when a projector named Edward Heming “obtained letters patent conveying to him, for a term of years, the exclusive right of lighting up London.” He stipulated that for a fee he would fit a light in front of every tenth door, from six to twelve, on nights without a moon. Heming’s patent was not ultimately satisfactory, however, and nine years later the aldermanic authorities gave permission to the Convex Light Company to illuminate the city; the name of the company itself suggests the development from the horn lantern to more subtle and sophisticated means of lighting with lenses and reflectors. Light had become fashionable. Indeed in the first decades of the eighteenth century, as part of the general “improvements” in the condition of London, the illumination of the streets became of paramount importance. It was still a matter of security-the Kensington Road, a notorious haunt of highwaymen, was the first to introduce oil-lamps with glazed lights, as early as 1694. In 1736 an Act was passed permitting the city authorities to implement a special lighting rate or lamp rate so that all the streets could be properly illuminated each night; as Stephen Inwood has suggested in A History of London, “this gave the City around 4,000 hours of lighting a year, compared to 300 or 400 before 1694, and 750 from 1694 to 1736.” Suburban parishes also began to levy special rates for lighting; so gradually, and by degrees of illumination, London at night became a different city.
In the early decades of the eighteenth century observers and strangers remarked upon its glare, and upon its “white ways.” By 1780 Archenholz reported that “As the English are prodigal of their money and attention in order to give everything that relates to the public an air of grandeur and magnificence, we might naturally expect to find London well lighted, and accordingly nothing can be more superb.” It seemed that, as every year passed, the nights of the city became steadily brighter. In 1762 Boswell noted “the glare of shops and signs,” while in 1785 another observed that “Not a corner of this prodigious city is unlighted … but this innumerable multitude of lamps affords only a small quantity of light, compared to the shops.” It is entirely appropriate that in these two accounts of London’s brightness the shops, the centre of trade and commerce, shine brightest of all.
Yet if it is an attribute of London that it becomes continually brighter- at first starting at a slow pace but then gradually increasing momentum until by the late twentieth century it had become almost over-bright-the brightness of one generation will also be the dimness of a succeeding one: the light of eighteenth-century London, the glory of the world, forty years later was dismissed as little more than a toy. In his Memoirs, published in the middle of the nineteenth century, John Richardson declared that “forty years ago the lighting of the streets was effected by what were called parish lamps. The lamp consisted of a small tin vessel, half filled with the worse train oil … In this fluid fish blubber was a piece of cotton twist which formed the wick.” In those days, therefore, the lamplighter became a familiar figure in the streets of London. There is a portrait of one in Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress lighting a lamp at the corner of St. James’s Street and Piccadilly; his face has an oafish, if not bestial, cast and he is spilling oil on the wig of the rake beneath. This must have been a familiar enough mishap upon the streets. Richardson has his own description of the lamplighters. “A set of greasy fellows redolent of Greenland Dock were employed to trim and light these lamps, which they accomplished by the apparatus of a formidable pair of scissors, a flaming flambeau of pitched rope and a rickety ladder, to the annoyance and danger of all passers-by. The oil vessel and wick were enclosed in a case of semi-opaque glass … which obscured even the little light it encircled.” These lamps were rarely, if ever, cleaned. And so by all accounts the great brightness of eighteenth-century London seemed, at least to later Londoners, to be an illusion. The streets did not seem ill-lit to their inhabitants at the time, however, because the brightness of London exactly conformed to their sense of the social milieu. The light is relative to the expectations and preoccupations of the city.