What Delhi was in the first week of November 2016, London might have been in 1952. That was when the Great Smog – also known as the Big Smoke and the Great Pea Soup – which led to the loss of thousands of lives.
On December 5 that year, the capital of England saw the cold weather leading to an accumulation of airborne pollutants, unleashing a thick layer of smog. The United Kingdom’s public weather service stated that it was so bad that a person couldn’t even see the other side of the lane. The occurrence was blamed on coal fires that were used for heating purposes in homes.
As meteorologist Mark Mancuso explains in the video above, the calamity claimed around 4,000 lives, while many more people ended up battling respiratory tract infections. Research conducted later suggested that the actual toll could have been as high as 12,000.
While the layer of smog started to disappear on December 9, it was a rude wake up call for the government, leading to the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1956.
People also ended up buying six-layered masks on a large scale in the following year as a preventive measure. The Great Smog of 1952 has been brought back in the public eye thanks to its appearance in the Netflix series, The Crown, for which the makers filled a giant warehouse with fog to recreate the incident.
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