ABSTRACT
The NSAI was a London-based pressure group but its campaign, focused on promoting smoke-prevention technologies through public display events, gathered momentum and saw it link up with like-minded campaigners around the country, such as the Manchester & Salford Noxious Vapour Abatement Association. In 1929, the NSAI became the National Smoke Abatement Society, and its resources and influence increased. However, it took a revival of deadly London ‘peasoupers’ and, most notably, the Great Smog of 1952 to finally get the consensus for far-reaching restrictions on smoke emissions in Britain with the Clean Air Act of 1956. The Act of 1858, stipulates that every furnace “shall be so constructed as to consume or burn the smoke arising from such furnace”; and goes on to say that the every person offending “without using the best practicable means for preventing or counteracting such smoke”.
