Smithfield Show
Books
- Five Days Without Sky London, 1952, and the Fog That Changed the World · Liszt Think
On December 5, 1952, an anticyclone trapped the smoke of a million coal fires over London. For five days, visibility fell to mere feet.
- The City of a Million Fires…previous fogs; it would not stop now. Yet the numbers were accumulating in ways that previous episodes had not predicted. The cattle at the Smithfield Show, imported for the annual agricultural exhibition, were dying in their pens, suffocated by air that their lungs, evolved for pasture and sky…
- The Smithfield Show…gh the night began to find its voice where no one had thought to listen. The cattle coughed first. This biological catastrophe at the Royal Smithfield Show, the premier livestock exhibition held annually in London, would become an undeniable parallel to the human crisis, a spectacle of death re…
- The Wind’s Return…by the official count, though the counting had been imperfect in the dark—lay in postures of distress that visibility made undeniable. The Smithfield Show had been intended to display the excellence of British livestock breeding. What it displayed now was the vulnerability of biological system…