Comments on: London’s ‘Great Smog of 1952′

By: Anne Shukri

Anne Shukri — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 20:30:00 +0000

I was three when this happened. I remember the edges of my eyes and nose being black. I was born in Manchester and we had the same smog.. My Mother was a bus conductor for Mayne’s buses in Droylsden. She used to walk in front of the bus with a torch. She suffered from severe bronchitis. You literally couldn’t see your nose it was so thick, pea soup thick! Anne

By: heather

heather — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 14:34:00 +0000

I was in the musical “Love from Judy” at the Saville theatre in London on the date of the fog. I lived in Kingsbury and took the tube to Picadilly. As I came up the stairs from the train it looked as if it was night time at five in the afternoon. Our theatre was foggy of course but we did have some kind of filtering system which I was taken up to see the drum where the fan circulated the air. There were large balls of mucky sort of fluff rolling around in there. I was fifteen years old and luckily had no health problems. The first line we sang as the Orphans in the show was “When the fog lifts we can see the penitentiary” As you can imagine that brought a great laugh for the four nights when the theatre was foggy inside.
Going home late at night after the show was really scary. I had to walk with my hand on the walls and fences to find my own house as the fog was thick in Kingsbury by then.
What a different time we are in. Can you imagine the outcry there would be today over so many deaths.
I now live in Canada and have often told my friends about those four days.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:42:00 +0000

Many of those video clips were NOT taken at night – they were taken by day. You literally ‘felt’ your way around – known landmarks just vanished as your space/time perception was warped. If you counted your paces to try reach somewhere you knew, it probably wasn’t there – you couldn’t look back to see if you’d walked in a straight line. I remember the taste and the grittiness – and everything you touched was dirty. At night you could just see your torch glow at arm’s length – if you had a torch. Street lights only appeared as you neared the foot of the pillar… I guess that the saying “don’t follow me – I’m lost too!” was coined during this smog. Gruesome……other-worldly. The worst was in London, but it was almost as bad elsewhere.