'London Particulars'

Coal started to be imported into the City of London from Newcastle on Tyne from the 14th century and gradually replaced wood and charcoal as the main fuel as trees became scarcer. Charcoal was known as coal and the coal brought in by sea became known as sea coal. The commodity along with many others was moved by barges, the only efficient way then of moving large quantities over a distance, through the rivers and canals to their destination.

Coal burning was soon casting a pall over the City and in the centuries to come would frequently, in winter, bring London to a standstill. In 1306 the burning of smoke producing coal was punishable by death.

John Evelyn in 1661, was complaining about the clouds of smoke which hung over the City saying they were 'so full of stink and darkness that the inhabitants breathed nothing but an impure thick mist, accompanied with fulginous and filthy vapour so that cathairs, phthisicks, coughs and sonsumptions reach more in this one city than in the whole earth besides'. 'The traveller,' he said, 'could smell the city many miles away and one poor country cousin became so indisposed within an hour or two of coming to town that he was regularly forced to take horse and ride for his life back to the open fields.'

In 1699 the fog (caused by coal burning) was so great that drums were beaten at the river to direct watermen to the shore. (Evelyn Diary.) He wrote that 'There happened this week (November 1699) so thick a mist and fog that people lost their way in the streets, it being so intense that no light of candles or torches yielded any (or but very little) direction.'

Benjamin Franklin wrote to his wife in 1758 complaining of the whole town being one great smoky house with every street being a chimney, the air full of floating sea coal soot.

In 1772 in the morning of 23 December the fog was so great it was as dark as midnight.

Charles Dickens was to describe such a fog, in Bleak House, as a 'London particular'. 'For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.'

One such fog in 1879-80 lasted from November until March.

The following is by W H Davies and appears in 'Wonderful London', ed. by St John Adcock which was published by Amalgamated Press every alternate Tuesday at a cost of 1 shilling 5½ d in the mid 1920's and could be bound in 3 volumes.

'I remember one day ... during a black fog, how thoughtful I became at the unreality of my surroundings. I could see nothing solid and substantial - all I could see were stars shining in the sky; and all those stars were the lights that were shining in the windows of tall buildings, where men could not see unless they had artficial light. But every kind of iron, wood and stone was invisible, and life appeared to be unreal and ghostly. For the first time in my life I became interested in the sound of my feet on the hard pavement - it was the only thing that seemed to prove that I had a body, and that a solid earth was under me.'

'... Some of these London fogs are so bewildering that a man loses all sense of space and distance, and cannot tell whether the light he sees comes from a lighted tram-car or from one of the heavenly bodies. And while he is standing there, wondering if he will dare to cross the road, he may hear someone tapping a stick on the hard pavement, and will recognize the blind, the only people who can find their way in a fog, no matter how black it is.'

At the end of November 1948 one of the worst fogs in years occurred and 4 people were killed in 3 train crashes.

'London Particulars' continued to be a nuisance for a few years after the passing of the Clean Air Act 1948.