ABSTRACT
Pollution had been taken for granted as being simply a part of urban living, and the organizations dedicated to cleaning up the atmosphere were largely ignored. Just as fogs were part of the long history of London, so were suggestions for ways to deal with air pollution. Culturally, fogs were seen as natural phenomena, and it was once thought that they originated in the countryside and drifted into the towns and cities. By the 1880s, a century’s experience of living with smoking chimneys had given a cultural permanence to the notion that coal smoke denoted wealth. Coal-dust, vegetable- dust, bone-dust, crockery dust, rough dust and sifted dust- all manner of dust. To the medical case for an end to coal fires, it added the theme of modernity as exemplified by gleaming white-goods. In the mid-1950s there was a spurt of consumerism in Britain.
