London Fog: the biography
CHRISTINE L. CORTON

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river … fog down the river ... fog in the eyes of Greenwich pensioners … fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin: fog cruelly pinching the toes of his shivering ’prentice on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”

Christine Corton quotes this famous opening to Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which appeared in 1853, the same year as Palmerston’s Smoke Abatement Act. It was smoke from the millions of domestic coal fires and thousands of industrial chimneys that, mixing with the damp foggy winter air, created thick, often impenetrable smog –  the “London peculiar” or “pea-souper”.