The Smoke Of London

William M. Cavert investigates the origins of urban air pollution, explaining how this problem arose during the early modern period.

First published in 1987, Peter Brimblecombe's book provides an engaging historical account of air pollution in London, offering a fascinating insight into the development of air pollution controls against a changing social and economic background. He examines domestic and industrial pollution and their effects on fashions, furnishings, buildings and human health. The book ends with an intriguing analysis of the dangers arising from contemporary pollutants and a glimpse of what the future may hold for London.

The classic London fogs—thick yellow “pea-soupers”—were born in the industrial age and remained a feature of cold, windless winter days until clean air legislation in the 1960s. Christine L. Corton tells the story of these epic London fogs, their dangers and beauty, and the lasting effects on our culture and imagination of these urban spectacles.

A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut Death in the Air is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit: for five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip and refused to let go. Day became night, mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. But in the chaotic aftermath, another killer was stalking the streets, using the fog as a cloak for his crimes. All across London, women were going missing--poor women, forgotten women. Their disappearances caused little alarm, but each of them had one thing in common: they had the misfortune of meeting a quiet, unassuming man, John Reginald Christie, who invited them back to his decrepit Notting Hill flat during that dark winter. They never left. The eventual arrest of the "Beast of Rillington Place" caused a media frenzy: were there more bodies buried in the walls, under the floorboards, in the back garden of this house of horrors? Was it the fog that had caused Christie to suddenly snap? And what role had he played in the notorious double murder that had happened in that same apartment building not three years before--a murder for which another, possibly innocent, man was sent to the gallows? The Great Smog of 1952 remains the deadliest air pollution disaster in world history, and John Reginald Christie is still one of the most unfathomable serial killers of modern times. Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids these strands together into a taut, compulsively readable true crime thriller about a man who changed the fate of the death penalty in the UK, and an environmental catastrophe with implications that still echo today.

From the sixteenth to early-nineteenth century, four times more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. While this forced migration stripped slaves of their liberty, it failed to destroy many of their cultural practices, which came with Africans to the New World. In Working the Diaspora, Frederick Knight examines work cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, from West and West Central Africa to British North America and the Caribbean. Knight demonstrates that the knowledge that Africans carried across the Atlantic shaped Anglo-American agricultural development and made particularly important contributions to cotton, indigo, tobacco, and staple food cultivation. The book also compellingly argues that the work experience of slaves shaped their views of the natural world. Broad in scope, clearly written, and at the center of current scholarly debates, Working the Diaspora challenges readers to alter their conceptual frameworks about Africans by looking at them as workers who, through the course of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation labor, shaped the development of the Americas in significant ways.

During WWII, Meg was told her husband had been killed. After the war Meg meets Geoffery and gets engaged. She finally feels like she can let go of the past and be happy again. That is until she starts receiving current photos of a man that looks very much like her dead husband. She turns to Albert and Amanda Campion for help. Meanwhile, the police are searching for an escaped convict who is on a murdering spree. Murders that are connected to Meg's dead husband, and Geoffery has gone missing...

Brought up in one of London's famed street markets, Jethro the cat burglar is as smart as he is streetwise, which is just as well, as he always needs all of his wits about him to pull off the perfect job and not get caught. After he breaks into the Soviet embassy and steals jewels belonging to the ambassador's wife, Jethro comes to the attention of His Majesty's Secret Service, who forces him to revisit the place again to retrieve a code book for them. But this is all just a set up for a thief to catch a thief, and it leads to a deadly game of cat and mouse to see who will get to Jethro first: London's gangsters, MI5, or one of the Soviet's most formidable secret agents.