September 4, 2026 • 10 mins
Imagine walking out your front door and not being able to see where you’re stepping because the air is so thick with yellow, greasy smog. This happened in London for 5 days back in 1952 and it killed 12,000 people!
Feel free to DM me if you have a story you’d like me to cover . . On Facebook it’s Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, I know you've seen those shows on TV
where people are living in some sort of dystopian future.
Life is oppressive. The earth is literally sick to death.
People are dropping like flies while others are just trying
to stay alive. Well, there was a moment, only about
65 years ago, where the city of London was plunged
into that scenario. I'm Patti Steele. The London fog that
(00:23):
killed 12,000 people. That's next on The Backstory. We're back
with a backstory. All right, imagine walking out of your
front door. You look toward the ground, but you can't
even see your own feet. Not because it's dark out,
because the air itself has turned almost solid. It's yellowish
(00:45):
black in color, greasy, and thick enough that when you
hold your hand out at arm's length, it's literally gone.
How do you breathe in that atmosphere? Buses are crawling,
following men walking with flares to mark the roadway for them.
Some theaters cancel shows because the audience can't see the
stage or screen. And at funeral parlors across the city,
(01:08):
something strange is happening. They're running out of coffins. Again,
this isn't some dark end-of-the-world TV show. This is London,
December 1952. And over five cold, still days, the deadliest
air pollution disaster in modern history is quietly killing thousands
of people. Most of the city just calls it weather. Now,
(01:30):
here's what you have to understand. London is used to
London fog, especially back then. The city has been famous
for its fog for centuries. Jack the Ripper relied on
it to stay hidden. Charles Dickens opened Bleak House with it.
Sherlock Holmes prowled through it at night. And Monet painted it.
In fact, he actually said London would be ugly without it.
(01:51):
But in that early December of 52, the depths start
to mount. Now, the problem is, this was no ordinary fog.
It actually never had been. It was an unattractive mix
of yellow, brown, and green. Why? Because it wasn't really
fog at all. It was smoke. You see, London ran
on coal, and it had for 300 years. Every home
(02:15):
in the city, and we're talking about 8 million people
by that time, heated itself with an open coal fire
in the living room grate. Every kitchen stove, coal. All
the power stations pumping electricity to the city, coal-fired plants.
The factories, the railways, the gasworks, coal, coal, coal. And
(02:36):
another little detail from history here. Britain in 1952 was
still broke from the Second World War. The country desperately
needed export revenue. So the good, clean-burning hard coal mined
in the countryside was being sold abroad. What Londoners got
to burn at home was the cheap stuff, a low-grade,
(02:57):
sulfur-heavy coal called nutty slack. It burned dirty. It smoked
and smelled terrible. Worse yet, the government actually encouraged people
to use it because it wasn't rationed. So you had
8 million people, millions of chimneys, all of them burning
the dirtiest coal available all day, every day, into the
(03:18):
skies of one low river valley. All that smoke usually
drifted away on the wind and everybody went about their business.
London had been getting away with it for three centuries.
But on December 5th, 1952, London stopped getting away with it.
What happened? Well, to turn everyday pollution into a catastrophic event,
(03:40):
the weather has to betray you. And in early December
of 52, it did. Meteorologists call it a temperature inversion. Normally,
air gets colder as you go higher up in the atmosphere. Warm,
smoky air rises off the city, cools, disperses, and blows away.
The sky acts like one big chimney. But that December,
(04:01):
a high-pressure system parked itself directly over southern England and
refused to move. Under it, the winds died to nothing.
Cold air pooled in the Thames Valley near the ground,
and a layer of warmer air slid in on top
of it, upside down. It was basically a lid, a
ceiling of warm air a few hundred feet above the rooftops,
(04:24):
sealing the city like a pot with the cover on.
Now it was as if every chimney in London was
pumping smoke into a closed room. Problem is, it was
bitterly cold outside, so every household did the one normal
thing that made everything worse. They piled more coal on
the fire, that filthy coal. By Friday morning, December 5th,
(04:47):
the fog had gone from atmospheric to apocalyptic. Each day
it got thicker. Visibility dropped in some spots to a
few yards. In parts of the East End, official reports
say it dropped to less than one foot. People couldn't
see their own shoes. They were frightened to step off
a curb because they couldn't see the street. Buses ran
(05:08):
only with a conductor walking ahead holding a flaming torch.
Talk about dark ages. Cars were simply abandoned in roadways.
River traffic on the Thames stopped. Flights were canceled after
one had to be talked down and then couldn't find
the terminal. The fog seeped into theaters and shows were
canceled because the audience couldn't see the stage or the screens.
(05:31):
The smog seeped into everything, into houses, under doors, through
window frames. People's curtains turned gray. Their skin and nostrils
turned black with soot. If you walked outside, you came
home filthy. Worst of all, what people were breathing was monstrous.
Every day, London's chimneys pushed out roughly a thousand tons
(05:52):
of smoky particles of chemicals, which, in that cold, wet,
trapped air, converted into an aerosol of sulfuric acid. Think
about it. Droplets of diluted battery acid hanging at nose
height over an entire capital city. At one major livestock show,
prized cattle began dying, so farmers improvised masks for them
(06:14):
out of whiskey-soaked grain sacks. Here's what makes the Great
Smog so chilling. There was no moment of panic, no sirens,
no headlines screaming disaster. Londoners had seen a thousand fogs.
They wrapped scarves over their faces, grumbled and carried on.
They were used to displaying that famous wartime stiff upper lip.
(06:35):
But the hospital wards were filling. People, especially the elderly, infants, smokers,
anybody with weak lungs or a weak heart, were seemingly
drowning on dry land. The first people to realize the
scale of what was happening weren't doctors or politicians. They
were actually undertakers. Why? Because they ran out of coffins
(06:56):
and florists who ran out of funeral wreaths. That's how
the death toll announced itself, not with alarms, with sold-out flowers.
The wind finally returned on December 9th and swept the
smog out to the North Sea, and the government tallied
the numbers. They believed at first that around 4,000 people
had died in those five days, but it turns out
(07:18):
the great smog and its aftermath had actually left as
many as 12,000 dead and another 100,000 very sick. Think
about that. 12,000 people killed by their own fireplaces. Some
politicians said folks should get over it. There was nothing
they could do about it. It was weather and an
economy fueled by coal. But 12,000 dead bodies spoke louder.
(07:43):
The government convened the Beaver Committee, and they found out
it wasn't weather, it was pollution, measurable, preventable, and lethal.
The result in 1956 was the Clean Air Act. one
of the first comprehensive air pollution laws anywhere in the world.
It created smoke control areas where only smokeless fuels could
(08:04):
be burned, pushed households toward gas, electricity, and cleaner coal,
and drove power stations out of the city centers. It
took years and another killer smog in 1962 to reinforce
the lesson. But the yellow fogs of the past gradually vanished.
A 300-year-old feature of London disappeared. simply stopped existing. Eventually,
(08:27):
other countries, including the United States, with its own Clean
Air Act in 1970, started to get serious about air pollution.
Here's what the Great Smog tells us. It wasn't caused
by villains, no reactor meltdown, no corporate cover-up. It was
caused by millions of ordinary people doing the most innocent thing,
lighting a fire to keep their families warm on a
(08:50):
cold night inside a system that the population was outgrowing.
And then the weather moved in. It took a shortage
of coffins and funeral wreaths for anybody to do the math.
The Great Smog showed us that the most dangerous threats
are the ones that arrive looking familiar. London had 300
years of practice ignoring its fog. It only took five
(09:12):
days of the wrong weather to turn that habit into
12,000 funerals. I hope you're enjoying The Backstory with Patti Steele.
Please leave a review and follow or subscribe for free
to get new episodes delivered automatically. And feel free to
DM me if you have a story you'd like me
to cover. On Facebook, it's Patti Steele, and on Instagram, RealPattiSteele.
(09:43):
I'm Patti Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia,
Premier Networks, the Elvis Duran Group, and Steel Trap Productions.
Our producer is Mike Peseglia. Our writer is Jake Kushner.
New episodes are out every Tuesday and Friday. And feel
free to reach out to me. with comments and story
suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty Steel and on Facebook
(10:05):
at Patty Steel. Thanks for listening to The Backstory with
Patty Steel, the pieces of history you didn't know you
needed to know.
All right, I know you've seen those shows on TV
where people are living in some sort of dystopian future.
Life is oppressive. The earth is literally sick to death.
People are dropping like flies while others are just trying
to stay alive. Well, there was a moment, only about
65 years ago, where the city of London was plunged
into that scenario. I'm Patti Steele. The London fog that
(00:23):
killed 12,000 people. That's next on The Backstory. We're back
with a backstory. All right, imagine walking out of your
front door. You look toward the ground, but you can't
even see your own feet. Not because it's dark out,
because the air itself has turned almost solid. It's yellowish
(00:45):
black in color, greasy, and thick enough that when you
hold your hand out at arm's length, it's literally gone.
How do you breathe in that atmosphere? Buses are crawling,
following men walking with flares to mark the roadway for them.
Some theaters cancel shows because the audience can't see the
stage or screen. And at funeral parlors across the city,
(01:08):
something strange is happening. They're running out of coffins. Again,
this isn't some dark end-of-the-world TV show. This is London,
December 1952. And over five cold, still days, the deadliest
air pollution disaster in modern history is quietly killing thousands
of people. Most of the city just calls it weather. Now,
(01:30):
here's what you have to understand. London is used to
London fog, especially back then. The city has been famous
for its fog for centuries. Jack the Ripper relied on
it to stay hidden. Charles Dickens opened Bleak House with it.
Sherlock Holmes prowled through it at night. And Monet painted it.
In fact, he actually said London would be ugly without it.
(01:51):
But in that early December of 52, the depths start
to mount. Now, the problem is, this was no ordinary fog.
It actually never had been. It was an unattractive mix
of yellow, brown, and green. Why? Because it wasn't really
fog at all. It was smoke. You see, London ran
on coal, and it had for 300 years. Every home
(02:15):
in the city, and we're talking about 8 million people
by that time, heated itself with an open coal fire
in the living room grate. Every kitchen stove, coal. All
the power stations pumping electricity to the city, coal-fired plants.
The factories, the railways, the gasworks, coal, coal, coal. And
(02:36):
another little detail from history here. Britain in 1952 was
still broke from the Second World War. The country desperately
needed export revenue. So the good, clean-burning hard coal mined
in the countryside was being sold abroad. What Londoners got
to burn at home was the cheap stuff, a low-grade,
(02:57):
sulfur-heavy coal called nutty slack. It burned dirty. It smoked
and smelled terrible. Worse yet, the government actually encouraged people
to use it because it wasn't rationed. So you had
8 million people, millions of chimneys, all of them burning
the dirtiest coal available all day, every day, into the
(03:18):
skies of one low river valley. All that smoke usually
drifted away on the wind and everybody went about their business.
London had been getting away with it for three centuries.
But on December 5th, 1952, London stopped getting away with it.
What happened? Well, to turn everyday pollution into a catastrophic event,
(03:40):
the weather has to betray you. And in early December
of 52, it did. Meteorologists call it a temperature inversion. Normally,
air gets colder as you go higher up in the atmosphere. Warm,
smoky air rises off the city, cools, disperses, and blows away.
The sky acts like one big chimney. But that December,
(04:01):
a high-pressure system parked itself directly over southern England and
refused to move. Under it, the winds died to nothing.
Cold air pooled in the Thames Valley near the ground,
and a layer of warmer air slid in on top
of it, upside down. It was basically a lid, a
ceiling of warm air a few hundred feet above the rooftops,
(04:24):
sealing the city like a pot with the cover on.
Now it was as if every chimney in London was
pumping smoke into a closed room. Problem is, it was
bitterly cold outside, so every household did the one normal
thing that made everything worse. They piled more coal on
the fire, that filthy coal. By Friday morning, December 5th,
(04:47):
the fog had gone from atmospheric to apocalyptic. Each day
it got thicker. Visibility dropped in some spots to a
few yards. In parts of the East End, official reports
say it dropped to less than one foot. People couldn't
see their own shoes. They were frightened to step off
a curb because they couldn't see the street. Buses ran
(05:08):
only with a conductor walking ahead holding a flaming torch.
Talk about dark ages. Cars were simply abandoned in roadways.
River traffic on the Thames stopped. Flights were canceled after
one had to be talked down and then couldn't find
the terminal. The fog seeped into theaters and shows were
canceled because the audience couldn't see the stage or the screens.
(05:31):
The smog seeped into everything, into houses, under doors, through
window frames. People's curtains turned gray. Their skin and nostrils
turned black with soot. If you walked outside, you came
home filthy. Worst of all, what people were breathing was monstrous.
Every day, London's chimneys pushed out roughly a thousand tons
(05:52):
of smoky particles of chemicals, which, in that cold, wet,
trapped air, converted into an aerosol of sulfuric acid. Think
about it. Droplets of diluted battery acid hanging at nose
height over an entire capital city. At one major livestock show,
prized cattle began dying, so farmers improvised masks for them
(06:14):
out of whiskey-soaked grain sacks. Here's what makes the Great
Smog so chilling. There was no moment of panic, no sirens,
no headlines screaming disaster. Londoners had seen a thousand fogs.
They wrapped scarves over their faces, grumbled and carried on.
They were used to displaying that famous wartime stiff upper lip.
(06:35):
But the hospital wards were filling. People, especially the elderly, infants, smokers,
anybody with weak lungs or a weak heart, were seemingly
drowning on dry land. The first people to realize the
scale of what was happening weren't doctors or politicians. They
were actually undertakers. Why? Because they ran out of coffins
(06:56):
and florists who ran out of funeral wreaths. That's how
the death toll announced itself, not with alarms, with sold-out flowers.
The wind finally returned on December 9th and swept the
smog out to the North Sea, and the government tallied
the numbers. They believed at first that around 4,000 people
had died in those five days, but it turns out
(07:18):
the great smog and its aftermath had actually left as
many as 12,000 dead and another 100,000 very sick. Think
about that. 12,000 people killed by their own fireplaces. Some
politicians said folks should get over it. There was nothing
they could do about it. It was weather and an
economy fueled by coal. But 12,000 dead bodies spoke louder.
(07:43):
The government convened the Beaver Committee, and they found out
it wasn't weather, it was pollution, measurable, preventable, and lethal.
The result in 1956 was the Clean Air Act. one
of the first comprehensive air pollution laws anywhere in the world.
It created smoke control areas where only smokeless fuels could
(08:04):
be burned, pushed households toward gas, electricity, and cleaner coal,
and drove power stations out of the city centers. It
took years and another killer smog in 1962 to reinforce
the lesson. But the yellow fogs of the past gradually vanished.
A 300-year-old feature of London disappeared. simply stopped existing. Eventually,
(08:27):
other countries, including the United States, with its own Clean
Air Act in 1970, started to get serious about air pollution.
Here's what the Great Smog tells us. It wasn't caused
by villains, no reactor meltdown, no corporate cover-up. It was
caused by millions of ordinary people doing the most innocent thing,
lighting a fire to keep their families warm on a
(08:50):
cold night inside a system that the population was outgrowing.
And then the weather moved in. It took a shortage
of coffins and funeral wreaths for anybody to do the math.
The Great Smog showed us that the most dangerous threats
are the ones that arrive looking familiar. London had 300
years of practice ignoring its fog. It only took five
(09:12):
days of the wrong weather to turn that habit into
12,000 funerals. I hope you're enjoying The Backstory with Patti Steele.
Please leave a review and follow or subscribe for free
to get new episodes delivered automatically. And feel free to
DM me if you have a story you'd like me
to cover. On Facebook, it's Patti Steele, and on Instagram, RealPattiSteele.
(09:43):
I'm Patti Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia,
Premier Networks, the Elvis Duran Group, and Steel Trap Productions.
Our producer is Mike Peseglia. Our writer is Jake Kushner.
New episodes are out every Tuesday and Friday. And feel
free to reach out to me. with comments and story
suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty Steel and on Facebook
(10:05):
at Patty Steel. Thanks for listening to The Backstory with
Patty Steel, the pieces of history you didn't know you
needed to know.
Host
Patty Steele
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