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From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Part 1—Shades of Yellow, Black, and Grey: The London ‘Pea Souper’, The ‘Manchester Entire’, and Sooty Hamburg around 1900

In London, a mysterious weather phenomenon clouded the fin de siècle. For eight consecutive winters from October 1893, large parts of the city were repeatedly engulfed in a mixture of smoke and fog which were perceived with several senses: not only was the visibility reduced to 200 yards, but the fog also made it difficult to breathe, and it came with a characteristic smell.1 Over three days in October 1901, this fog was so thick that artificial lighting was required around Piccadilly during the day; even though the sun was shining in Kensington, it could not penetrate the haze in central London.2 This gave rise to unusual colours: what would have been ordinary white fog in the countryside was stained yellowish-brown, and at times almost black, by ‘our myriad of chimneys’ in the city. As one meteorologist explained, the ‘combination of fog and smoke had disastrous effects on human life, and when the people of London knew what the cost in life and money was they would be willing to do everything possible to stop the smoke nuisance.’3 In November 1900, the London-based Meteorological Council therefore wrote to the London City Council urging it to initiate an investigation ‘into the occurrence and distribution of fogs in London’.4

‘London’s famous fog—the best in the world’, a trade newspaper claimed with black humour in 1901. The article made fun of the efforts of the ‘weather people’, claiming that they could predict the fog no more accurately than they could the weather in general.5 Meanwhile, a design submitted by a German architect to the London County Council offered a remedy in the form of ‘atmospheric stations’, which would dispel the stinking fog by using steam pumps to bring clean country air into the city through a pipe construction, but this remained an unbuilt curiosity from the realm of the imagination.6

The ‘London fog’, which gathered, in particular, in green areas such as Hyde Park, soon became as notorious an attribute of the British capital as ice in Moscow and wind in Chicago. In the popular imagination, it became a home and breeding ground for obscure figures and nameless, clandestine crimes. As a motif, it features in literature from Victorian-era tales to The Lodger, Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes’ 1913 version of the Jack the Ripper story, which was adapted for the screen several times over the following decades, including by Alfred Hitchcock with the subtitle A Story of the London Fog.7 The preferred setting for the London novels of Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad is also in fog.

The history of smoke and stench in the city goes back further. In a poem about fog published in a London newspaper in November 1844 and illustrated with a shadowy scene of the area around Temple Bar (Fig. 1), the anonymous author longs for clean air, an azure sky, and the scents of the countryside in the face of ‘Innumerable chimnies’ sooty vapours’. The poet dreams of ‘inhaling all the thousand od’rous breaths / Of fragrant shrubs and flowers wildly growing’, but the poem ends with a sigh: ‘Such simple, natural, unsophisticated / Innocent joys as these, are not, alas! / For men who dwell in busy, smoky, London.’8

Fig. 1: ‘A Scene near Temple-Bar, during the Fog’. Source: The Illustrated London News, 23 Nov. 1844. From The London Archives. Photo by Bodo Mrozek.

The history of such outbreaks of air pollution can be traced back to a 1306 decree against the burning of coal by King Edward I. It continues through a pamphlet called fumifugium, published in 1661 by the newly founded Royal Society, to what was known as the ‘Great Stink’ in the summer of 1858, when the Houses of Parliament were threatened with evacuation due to pollution in the Thames.9 An official report by the London County Council stated in 1904 that the ‘smoke question is a very old one’, but noted that in more recent times it had become linked to the introduction of coal as a general-purpose fuel.10

However, the fogs that appeared from the late nineteenth century onwards were by no means limited to London. Although the contemporary name for the fog on the Thames, the ‘London Particular’, implied uniqueness, it was also, in the same period, notoriously known as the ‘Manchester Entire.’11 Similar phenomena appeared on the US West Coast as well as in Pittsburgh and Chicago, in Chemnitz (the ‘German Manchester’), and even Hamburg, one of the ‘greatest sooty cities of Germany’, was considered ‘almost as foggy as London’ around 1899, with its ‘clouds of sooty fumes that regularly billowed across the city’ and, occasionally, a ‘layer of black air’.12 While the Smoke Abatement League had been campaigning against air pollution in London since 1894, in Hamburg the Verein für Feuerungsbetrieb und Rauchbekämpfung (Association for Furnace Operation and Smoke Abatement), which had links to industry, attempted to implement preventative measures from 1902.13 Ultimately, London fogs, also known as ‘Pea Soupers’, made linguistic history when the terms ‘fog’ and ‘smoke’ were merged to coin a new word. Although this neologism is usually dated to the 1950s, it already existed in the fog discourse of 1904: ‘smog’.14

Smog is a focus of environmental history,15 and the concept of the environment (which emerged as early as the nineteenth century) places humans at the centre of a spatial construct. The term ‘environmental pollution’ can be broken down into air and water pollution, ‘acid’ rain, forest dieback, and other sub-phenomena that pose problems for air, water, woodland, and wildlife. In my work on a broader olfactory history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I adopt a sensory history approach to the issue, which means focusing on the human experience of environmental pollution from a sensory perspective.

Smog, for example, was not only perceptible with multiple sensory modalities—that is, via intersensory apprehension—but also changed perception itself.16 At the same time, human perception (or, as sensory studies prefer to specify: human sensing) served aísthēsĭc processes of building knowledge about smog until the late twentieth century. More recent research has similarly focused on the relationship between humans and the weather. As Alain Corbin has shown, it is not long ago that that wet weather began to be perceived as ‘bad weather’—a development that is closely linked with urbanization.17 While rain was still welcome in agrarian societies, damp weather came to be seen as ‘bad’ around the same time as the advent of the umbrella, which in eighteenth-century England was regarded as a symbol of ‘French effeminacy’ before it became an icon of the English gentleman. As Corbin reminds us, poetry, too, equated raindrops with tears, such as in the letters of the Marquise de Sévigné, published in 1752. Of course, the idea that the weather can affect one’s mood is also part of the history of emotions. As an anthropogenic weather phenomenon, however, smog has a special significance for other historical disciplines too, such as the history of knowledge, and of medicine.

In England, smog had been associated with cholera since the mid nineteenth century. In September 1853, a physicist and doctor in the service of the Royal Observatory recorded a blue dampness that lasted for weeks, a thick fog in which small black flies appeared, cockerels rarely crowed, and swallows could hardly be seen. He described the sun as pale and watery, of a sickly brightness, and the fog as numbing the nose: ‘The smell of the country has lost its freshness.’18 These visual and olfactory impressions of an all-suffocating dirty dampness, a ‘miasmatic’ atmosphere, coincided with the outbreak of cholera. As the fog had settled over the country, muffling all sounds, it had also brought, according to the doctor, a deathly silence.19 These assessments, which were in line with the contemporary miasma theory of ‘bad air’, presented the fog as a cause of illness and death. Due to more recent findings in microbiology, this doctrine was already obsolete by the time of the Seventh Congress of Hygiene and Demography in London in 1891. However, the Congress still concluded that that fog, with its characteristic odour, worsened the spread of disease, for although it did not transport miasmas, it could transport dust and bacteria, affecting the plant and animal world, and especially human health.20

Fig 2: ‘Extraordinary fog’: Painting from Claude Monet’s London series: Houses of Parliament, Sunset, 1900–3. Courtesy of the Hasso Plattner Collection, Museum Barberini, Potsdam.

As a result, fog, which during the Romantic period (most prominently in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c.1818) had been transfigured into a mystical natural phenomenon that swallowed up civilization, was increasingly perceived as negative. However, the ‘London Particular’ prompted Impressionist painters to visit the Thames—including the French artist Claude Monet, who came around 1870/71 as a ‘fog tourist’ (and a refugee from the Germans), and who dabbed and smeared the misty Houses of Parliament and a soft-focus Waterloo Bridge onto his canvases. Some years later, he praised the ‘extraordinary fog, entirely yellow’ in a letter to his wife, Alice. (Monet’s foggy Thames paintings only recently travelled to Potsdam and to London, where they were on display in two exhibitions.)21 Urban fog was now largely regarded as a strangely coloured, foul-smelling, noise-swallowing, sight-blocking, and therefore potentially life-threatening phenomenon.22 Several laws, such as the Smoke Acts of 1853–6, the Sanitary Act of 1866 (in which the fog was labelled ‘black fog’ for the first time), and the Public Health (London) Acts of 1875 and 1891, were aimed at combating air pollution. These new fogs prompted the British government to set up a committee in the spring of 1914 to examine the need for new legislation, but the First World War, which brought completely different priorities for a coal-fuelled war economy, stifled these efforts.23

The post-war periods were to bring new nuisances from fog and smoke. To be continued …


Translated by Marielle Sutherland

This blog post is Part 1 of a series of 3 and is based on archival research made possible by a fellowship at the German Historical Institute London in the foggy month of November 2024. My thanks go to Christina von Hodenberg and the GHIL team. This contribution will also be published in German as an article in an issue of the journal Historische Anthropologie on climate perception edited by my fellow GHIL scholarship holder Karolin Wetjen together with Regina Thumser-Wöhs (forthcoming). I am grateful to the Museum Barberini for permission to publish the image of a painting in its foundation collection, and to Marielle Sutherland for the translation into English.


Feature image:  Nelson’s Column during the Great Smog of 1952. Photo taken December 1952
cc-by-sa/2.0 – © N T Stobbs – geograph.org.uk/p/765606

  1. The London Archives (TLA), CL/MD/1/1, London County Council (Department of the Clerk of the Council): General Purposes Committee: Minutes and Correspondence. Subject: ‘Atmospheric Pollution’ (unpag.), ‘Fog Observations’. Memorandum by the Medical Officer Shirley F. Murphy (undated). []
  2. See ‘Distribution of Fogs’, The Insurance Observer (25 Oct. 1901). []
  3. ‘Distribution of Fogs’, The Insurance Observer (25 Oct. 1901). []
  4. TLA, CL/MD/1/1: Letter from the Meteorological Council to the General Purpose Committee (21 Nov. 1900). []
  5. The Shoe & Leather Recorder (23 Oct. 1901). []
  6. TLA, CL/MD/1/1: Correspondence between the private architect Rud.[olf] Custodis and the London County Council on 27 Oct. 1901; transcript copy of his ‘Memorandum’ in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger on 12 Mar. 1902 and further correspondence with the British Ambassador in Berlin and the Royal Society (unpag.). []
  7. See Christine L. Corton, London Fog: The Biography (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 122–6, 330; Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (Charlottesville, VA, 2016). []
  8. N. C., ‘A November Fog in London’, The Illustrated London News (3 Nov. 1844). []
  9. See Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times (London, 1987), 40, 47; Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis, new edn. (Stroud, 2001). []
  10. TLA, CL/MD/1/1: Smoke Nuisance Legislation 1904–14: London County Council: ‘Smoke Nuisance in London. Report of the Chief Officer of the Public Control Department’. Printed by order of the Public Control Committee (10 June 1904). []
  11. ‘Smoke and Fog’, The Public Health Engineer (3 Dec. 1904). []
  12. Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, and other German cities also saw fog. See Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1987), 121–2. []
  13. See Frank Uekötter, ‘Umweltschutz in den Händen der Industrie—eine Sackgasse? Die Geschichte des Hamburger Vereins für Feuerungsbetrieb und Rauchbekämpfung’, Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte, 47/2 (2002), 198–216. []
  14. The word appears in a letter to the editor from the Treasurer of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society, H. A. des Voeux, ‘London Fog: To the Editor of the Times’, The Times (27 Dec. 1904). []
  15. See e.g. Scott Hamilton Dewey, Don’t Breathe the Air: Air Pollution and US Environmental Politics, 1945–1970 (College Station, TX, 2000), esp. 94–5, 40–9, 155, 228–9; Ian Douglas, Cities: An Environmental History (London, 2013), esp. 67–8, 74–6, 78; Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommelspacher, Blauer Himmel über der Ruhr: Geschichte der Umwelt im Ruhrgebiet, 1840–1990 (Essen, 1992); Tobias Huff, ‘Ökonomische Modernisierung in der DDR und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Parallelen in der Entwicklung von Luftreinhaltung und Lärmschutz’, in Martin Bemmann, Birgit Metzger, and Roderich von Detten (eds.), Ökologische Modernisierung: Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart eines Konzepts in Umweltpolitik und Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main, 2014), 287–313. []
  16. On intersensory perception, see Bodo Mrozek, ‘Die achtzehn Sinne’, Merkur, 74/4 (2020), 59–66, at 61. []
  17. See Alain Corbin, ‘Sous la pluie’, in Alain Corbin (ed.), La pluie, le soleil et le vent: Une histoire de la sensibilité au temps qu’il fait (Paris, 2013), 9–36. See also Bodo Mrozek, ‘Sensed Communities’, Merkur, 76/8(2022), 41–51, at 45. []
  18. James Ansley Hingeston, Topics of the Day: Medical, Social, and Scientific (London, 1863), 21–2. []
  19. Hingeston, Topics of the Day, 6. []
  20. See Transactions of the Seventh International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, London, 10–17 August, 1891 (London, 1893), Index, 347–8, 349–50. []
  21. Monet quoted after OW [=Ortrud Westheider], in Ortrud Westheider, Michael Philipp, and Daniel Zamani (eds.), Sonne: Die Quelle des Lichts in der Kunst (Munich, London, and New York, 2023 (catalogue from the Potsdam exhibition, 25 Feb.–11 June 2023, 228); see also The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition, ‘Monet and London: Views of the Thames’, The Courtauld Gallery, London (27 Sept. 2024–19 Jan. 2025). []
  22. See Corton, London Fog, 182–9. []
  23. See David Stradling and Peter Thorsheim, ‘The Smoke of Great Cities: British and American Efforts to Control Air Pollution, 1860–1914’, Environmental History, 4/1 (1999), 6–31, at 22. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Bodo Mrozek (April 28, 2025). From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved May 21, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13tsx


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Bodo Mrozek

I am a historian, working on cultural and contemporary history. In my last book Jugend - Pop - Kultur. Eine transnationale Geschichte (Histoire de la pop. Quand la culture jeune dépasse les frontières), I analyze both the criminalization and the establishment of an international youth and pop culture during the second half of the 20th century. Currently, I am a researcher at the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies of the Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin, working on sensory and hybrid warfare and the olfactory history of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

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