The Great Smog of London: the air was thick with apathy In one sense The Times was right: the Great Smog had been brewing for a long time. Air pollution, of course, is as old as fire itself, as mummies" blackened lungs testify. Seneca was frequently told by his physician to flee Rome's pollution to aid his ailing health. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors were particularly prone to sinusitis, partly because their homes were less well ventilated even than those of their Iron Age forebears, thus accumulating smoke. The first documentary record of British air pollution has Henry III's queen Eleanor being forced to cut short a visit to Nottingham in 1257 because of fumes from burning coal. Her son, Edward I, was the first to act against it, setting up a commission in 1285, under instructions to come up with a solution. And so it did - 31 years later - banning the use of the fuel on pain of "grievous ransoms." That did not have much effect, but - as Prof Peter Brimblecombe in his classic book The Big Smoke, records - the Black Death did: it killed perhaps a quarter of Britons, causing land to go uncultivated and trees to grow back where home counties forest had once been felled. Wood became a cheaper fuel than coal. Yet two centuries later, as he explains, wood was scarce again and coal returned. Elizabeth I complained she was "greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke" of it, while James I was "moved to compassion" by the way the pollution was eating away at St Paul's Cathedral, and oversaw a law banning burning the fuel within a mile of his court. Things only got worse. Forty years later, the diarist John Evelyn described London as "eclipsed with such a cloud of sulphur as the sun itself is hardly able to penetrate" asking: "Is there under Heaven such coughing and snuffling to be heard as in the churches and assemblies of London, where the barking and spitting is incessant and most importunate?" The first great smog may indeed have occurred in his lifetime: in November 1679 deaths rose sharply during two recorded "great stinking fogs." After many failed parliamentary attempts, Palmerston, as home secretary, finally got some weak legislation through, but the fogs still swirl evilly through the works of Dickens and Conan Doyle: in one real great smog 19 people were drowned after walking unwittingly into the Thames, its docks and the Regent's Canal. And in 1892, after a succession of fogs, the author Robert Barr produced a novel predicting that one would wipe out almost the whole population of London in the mid-20th century. Shortly before the 1952 disaster, Harold Macmillan, rejecting calls for legislation, reached for the same device as Edward I: "I suggest we form a committee. We cannot do very much, but we can seem to be very busy and that is half the battle nowadays. The committee did not have a chance to meet before the disaster struck, but the descent of the Great Smog did little to induce a sense of urgency. Even after the death toll was known, Macmillan - rather like today's Treasury when resisting green measures - pleaded "an enormous number of broad economic considerations that have to be taken into account." It was only after an inquiry had established that air pollution cost the country hundreds of millions of pounds a year - and that cleaning it up was very cheap by comparison - that ministers seriously contemplated action. And even then it was only provoked into legislation when a flamboyant backbencher, the luxuriantly moustachioed Gerald Nabarro, put down a private member's Bill. The 1956 Clean Air Act finally did the job - and increased December sunshine by 70 per cent. But, while London's air now looks far cleaner, it has become deadly again as pollution from car exhausts has replaced coal. Today it contains higher levels of nitrogen dioxide than the air of any other European capital, and is well over the danger limit for even more harmful particulates. More than 4,000 people die as a result each year, even though, back in 1985, the government promised that by 2000 air quality would be "improved to a point at which recognised air pollutants do not pose a threat to public health." Britain is breaking European law over both pollutants. But, even more supine than Supermac, the Government does not expect to be back within legal limits before 2025. As James Thornton, chief executive of the green legal practice Client Earth, says: "History is repeating itself."