The smog seeped inside buildings as well. Weekend soccer games were cancelled, although Oxford and Cambridge carried on with their annual cross-country competition at Wimbledon Common with the help of track marshals who continually shouted, “This way, this way, Oxford and Cambridge” as runners materialized out of the thick haze. Looting, burglaries and purse snatchings increased as emboldened criminals easily vanished into the darkness. By the time they returned home, their faces and nostrils blackened by the air, Londoners resembled coal miners.Īuthorities advised parents to keep their children home from school, partly from fear they would get lost in the blinding smog. Wheezing pedestrians groped their way around the city’s neighborhoods and tried not to slip on the greasy black ooze that coated sidewalks. Many found the effort futile and simply abandoned their cars.Ĭonductors holding flashlights walked in front of London’s iconic double-decker buses to guide drivers down city streets. Even during the middle of the day, drivers turned on their headlights and hanged their heads out car windows to inch ahead through the thick gloom. Flights were grounded and trains cancelled. For five days, the Great Smog paralyzed London and crippled all transportation, except for the London Underground train system.īecause of poor visibility, boat traffic on the River Thames came to a halt. The smog was so dense that residents in some sections of the city were unable to see their feet as they walked. The noxious, 30-mile-wide air mass, teeming with acrid sulfur particles, reeked like rotten eggs-and it was getting worse every day. The temperature inversion prevented London’s sulfurous coal smoke from rising, and with nary a breeze to be found, there was no wind to disperse the soot-laden smog. Fog, combined with smoke to produce smog, was nothing new in London, but this particular “pea souper” quickly thickened into a poisonous stew unlike anything the city had ever experienced.Ī high-pressure weather system had stalled over southern England and caused a temperature inversion, in which a layer of warm air high above the surface trapped the stagnant, cold air at ground level.
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