Out of the Fog

For more than 600 years, Londoners alternately cursed and boasted about their famous fogs. In 1852, Charles Dickens wrote of leaden skies filled with black soot that resembled snowflakes "gone into mourning for the death of the sun." Some 60 years later, T. S. Eliot immortalized the ". . . yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes." Fog shrouded the malevolent doings of London villains from Jack the Ripper to Mr. Hyde, and was all too familiar to Sherlock Holmes, who frequently set forth from Baker Street picking his way through a real "pea-souper."

Yet today, to the dismay of moviemakers and the delight of countless Britons, London fog has virtually vanished. Only three or four times a year does anything that can credibly be described as fog descend on the city. Even then, it is never the suffocating, smoke-laden, brown or yellow stuff that once mantled the city with dreary regularity --and sometimes lethal results. This year London skies were clear even during November, usually the foggiest month.

The fog crept to its peak in 1952, when Londoners learned a hard lesson: if there was romance and mystery in the murk, there was also death. During the Great Fog of 1952, which cloaked London for four days, some 4,000 people, most of them with respiratory ills, were killed by the polluted air; about twice that number perished later as a direct result of those four terrible days. Until then, a succession of monarchs, Prime Ministers and Parliaments had tried in vain to ban the burning of soft coal, which was largely responsible for the pea-soupers. But the killer fog--followed by a study concluding that air pollution was costing the country about $700 million a year in lost efficiency and cleaning bills--jolted the British into action. In 1956, a Clean Air Act aimed at industrial and domestic air polluters was pushed through Parliament. Most important, the traditional burning of soft coal in hearth grates was prohibited in large areas across Britain.

Bright Buildings. To comply with the new regulations, British industry has spent nearly a billion dollars in the past decade to clean up the emissions from its smokestacks.

London has led the way in smoke control. The 156,000 tons of sooty grime it once belched into the air annually have been cut by 80%, and about three-quarters of the city is actually smokeless. "We estimate that London now gets 50% more sunlight in the winter than before the act," says Lord Kennet. What is more, many of Britain's public buildings have been scrubbed down and look brighter than they have in decades, if not centuries.

Perhaps the most pleasing result, for London bird watchers at least, is that the songbirds missing from the city for almost a century are returning. The first house martins in nearly 80 years have been found nesting near Primrose Hill. Elsewhere, rare birds such as the snow bunting, the hoopoe, the great northern diver and the bearded tit have reappeared. It may be only a matter of time before nightingales return to sing once again in Berkeley Square.

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