Cities choked by fog

Text 1: A London Particular, by Septimus Lark

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

November 22nd. The fog came down at noon and by three o’clock it was dark as midnight in the Strand. It is not white, as country fogs are, but the colour of pea soup, and it has a taste, of sulphur and soot, which one carries upon one’s tongue all evening. Linkboys with torches were offering to guide gentlemen home at sixpence a street, and I saw an omnibus horse led along the kerb by a man walking at its head like a blind man’s dog.

I lost my way between the club and my own door, a walk I have made a thousand times, and found myself, I know not how, beside the river, hearing the water without seeing it. It is a strange thing to be a stranger in one’s own city.

I am told that in the courts behind Drury Lane the old and the sickly are dying of it by the dozen. We who have good fires and thick curtains complain of the inconvenience. They breathe it all night. And the fog, after all, is nothing but our own chimneys come home to us.

Text 2: Breathing Grey, by Anjali Desmond

An original contemporary article.

By the second week of the smog, I could no longer see the tower blocks across the road from my office. The air was not exactly fog. It was a dirty yellow haze that hung at head height and turned the sun into a pale coin you could look at directly. It tasted of metal and burning rubbish, and it got into everything, my clothes, my hair, the back of my throat.

Traffic crawled with headlights on at midday. One evening I took a wrong turning on my way home from the metro station, a route I walk every day, and found myself on a street I did not recognise, surrounded by shapes that only became people at the last moment. I felt like a tourist in my own neighbourhood.

My colleagues and I wore expensive masks and ran air purifiers at home. The rickshaw drivers and street sellers had a scarf over their mouths, if that. A doctor told me the hospitals were full of children and elderly people who could not breathe. Everybody blamed the weather. But this was not weather. We made it ourselves, with every car and every fire, and then we breathed it.

Both writers describe living in a city choked by fog or smog.

What are the similarities between the writers’ experiences and ideas about the polluted air?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.