A London Particular

Synopsis

London’s deadliest fog. Six hidden lives. One unforgettable winter.

December, 1952. Turkeys and tangerines are scarce. Suicide, like homosexuality, is as illegal as the crimes of spivs and cosh boys perched at saloon bars and coffee stands. Churchill is in Number 10. Attlee is in opposition. Gilbert Harding is the rudest man on television and almost as famous as the new Queen of England. He stands on the stage at the Trocadero, the largest cinema in Europe. He wants his future to be over. Irene is a working-class Londoner; heavily pregnant and newly wed. He signs an autograph. She sees death on his face. Their encounter occurs days before a smog engulfs England’s capital. It will be the greatest air pollution disaster in history.

For Londoners like Irene the smog becomes the IT that’s as big a threat as the enemy during the Blitz, and the coloured interlopers colonising nearby neighbourhoods, while the government and the BBC become the THEY keeping the masses in the dark. Rumours abound: cosh boys are looting; greyhounds are beating mechanical hares at dog tracks; at public conveniences, queer encounters are on the rise. Big Ben is expected to freeze and fall silent, yet it’s as though time has already stopped. It’s a historic moment. Halted by the fog, Irene and those that inhabit her world – husband Bill, her mother, sister Dinkie, her brother-in-law, the blousy Win, Bent Frank – reveal their stories. In A London Particular these figures are captured off-guard, on street corners, at market stalls, in pubs and hospital beds. Like the Box Brownie snapshots Dinkie’s husband Ted is forever taking for his scrapbooks, to hold the passing moment captive.

The fog, like the canal and the old workhouse, is a hangover from the Victorian era, in a nation emerging from austerity and a capital finally embracing a twentieth-century landscape. Change is in the air. Even Irene and Bill, desperate to find a home when the baby arrives and leave her mother’s overcrowded parlour, are hopeful. But for now they are landlocked, fogbound, until the familiar sights of the city materialise: from the elephant under its castle to Nelson on his column. They are a particular breed of Londoner, living through a particular fog, in a particular London – all of which will soon vanish.