As hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the capital to find work or make their fortune, new suburbs emerged, extending the city’s housing in all directions and every house had its coal fire, belching quantities of sulphur-laden smoke into the air during the winter months. Helped by the growth of communications - canals, metalled roads, and by the 1830s railways as well - London was becoming an economic hub, with industries typical of a major city, such as paper, printing and publishing, instrument engineering, gas and power, chemicals, leather and luxury goods, and, even more important in terms of population growth, public administration, the law, and professions and services of many kinds. London’s population, around a million in 1800, had grown to one and a half million twenty years later and passed the two million mark in the 1830s. And in the 1820s and 1830s smoke and soot from coal fires were spreading through the air in ever-increasing quantities as the city began to grow apace with the impact of the industrial revolution. The more smoke and soot in the atmosphere, the more likely a fog was to form and the longer it was likely to last. The reason for the increase in the number of foggy days in London town was not some change in the climate but a rapid increase in the quantity of pollutants, above all from coal fires, that mixed with naturally occurring water vapour at times of temperature inversion to create a London fog, coloured yellow from the sulphurous emissions trapped beneath the cold air above the city.
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