October 8 — London has a reputation of a grim landscape with one key characteristic. Charles Dickens writes in the first chapter of Bleak House (1852):
“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green sits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside of a great (and dirty) city... Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”
T.S. Eliot personifies this characteristic as a cat in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1911):
“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.”
Unsurprisingly, there is even an entire book which examines these distinctive “pea-soupers”: London Fog: A Biography (2015) by Christine Corton, not to mention an illustrious coat company and even a cocktail named after this not-so-natural phenomenon.
We, however, have been lucky enough to meet London in a sunny, late September hue. A woman sits outside a cafe, flicking through stapled papers, a mug of something dark in front of her, and smoke dissipating up to the sky from her cigarette. A small boy in a blue coat chases after geese in Victoria Park (only 1.3 miles/2 kilometers away from Queen Mary’s campus). The canal fades from an opaque green (where ducks and swans dive among litter and leaves) to a murky slate blue-grey. Someone ties their canal barge to a stake in the ground, waving to a woman sipping tea atop her own boat. Someone else unties their barge from the stake and moves down Regent’s Canal via the locks. Most pedestrians are in sweaters or light jackets at most. It almost feels as if London is trying to make a good impression on us, politely taking off its heathered hat to bid us “hello, nice to meet you.”
This city sits stuck in an empty snow globe, pausing not even to take a breath but to hover in the closest thing that gets to stillness for the living concrete organism. The tube still runs despite the sun (though make note of planned closures to the Central, District, and Hammersmith & City Lines if coming from the Mile End station). Pedestrians still jaywalk despite it. Markets still open and close in Camden and Brick Lane despite it. The clouds move lethargically in the sky unlike the people on the streets. I had expected the commotion of bodies to be accompanied by a precipitative commotion: the sound of rain on umbrellas, double-decker buses through oily puddles, a constant running down gutters and windows. Not only this, but I had expected any kind of dormancy to rely upon a thick grey fog: a blanket, a cat, a rolling grey actor upon the city.
As October settles in, so does a mist (of sorts), clouding the sunrises and sunsets, dipping the urban jungle in milky grey ink. The mist, like smoke off cigarettes, dissipates partway through the day after saying “Good Morning” and rolls away for the sun. No fog—not yet. Though I’m sure all we have to do is wait.
“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green sits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside of a great (and dirty) city... Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”
T.S. Eliot personifies this characteristic as a cat in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1911):
“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.”
Unsurprisingly, there is even an entire book which examines these distinctive “pea-soupers”: London Fog: A Biography (2015) by Christine Corton, not to mention an illustrious coat company and even a cocktail named after this not-so-natural phenomenon.
We, however, have been lucky enough to meet London in a sunny, late September hue. A woman sits outside a cafe, flicking through stapled papers, a mug of something dark in front of her, and smoke dissipating up to the sky from her cigarette. A small boy in a blue coat chases after geese in Victoria Park (only 1.3 miles/2 kilometers away from Queen Mary’s campus). The canal fades from an opaque green (where ducks and swans dive among litter and leaves) to a murky slate blue-grey. Someone ties their canal barge to a stake in the ground, waving to a woman sipping tea atop her own boat. Someone else unties their barge from the stake and moves down Regent’s Canal via the locks. Most pedestrians are in sweaters or light jackets at most. It almost feels as if London is trying to make a good impression on us, politely taking off its heathered hat to bid us “hello, nice to meet you.”
This city sits stuck in an empty snow globe, pausing not even to take a breath but to hover in the closest thing that gets to stillness for the living concrete organism. The tube still runs despite the sun (though make note of planned closures to the Central, District, and Hammersmith & City Lines if coming from the Mile End station). Pedestrians still jaywalk despite it. Markets still open and close in Camden and Brick Lane despite it. The clouds move lethargically in the sky unlike the people on the streets. I had expected the commotion of bodies to be accompanied by a precipitative commotion: the sound of rain on umbrellas, double-decker buses through oily puddles, a constant running down gutters and windows. Not only this, but I had expected any kind of dormancy to rely upon a thick grey fog: a blanket, a cat, a rolling grey actor upon the city.
As October settles in, so does a mist (of sorts), clouding the sunrises and sunsets, dipping the urban jungle in milky grey ink. The mist, like smoke off cigarettes, dissipates partway through the day after saying “Good Morning” and rolls away for the sun. No fog—not yet. Though I’m sure all we have to do is wait.
—India Roper-Moyes