London: The Great Smoke?
 

I'm a Coronation Street freak and often questions arise from terms they use that makes me curious - like last night when Mike Baldwin (on Canadian TV we're lagging about nine months behind the UK shows so Baldwin is la-la land and yet to depart) said (and for non-Corrie fans Baldwin is a wealthy and rather villain factory owner whose Alzheimer's causes him to remember things in the long past but nothing current, etc.)

Anyway Baldwin says, thinking he had just returned from London, "I hate going to the Great Smoke - just too many people there - too crowded"

Well i have never heard London called the Great Smoke but is my theory right that this may have been London's nickname during the terrible smog years from coal burning? Or is it something still used. Thanks to all the great Brits who respond to these rather idiotic questions.

Its referred to as the "big smoke" because of a smog problem that occured in the city in the fifties during a fog

The great smog week of 1952 was particularly awful, and led to the Clean Air Act and the abolition of coal fires; but the name is much older, I'm sure, back to Dickensian times or maybe even older. Before him, Cobbett called London the Great Wen.

lawchick - yes Baldwin said the Big Smoke, not Great Smoke as i wrote. Thanks.

it's usually just "The Smoke". And yes it refers to the polution.

incidentallt edinburtgh is called "Auld Reekie" which means exactly the same thing - but in jock.

The legendary london fogs used to actually kill people as late as the 50s.

Here's an academic site on the fog/smog/smoke:

http://www.portfolio.mvm.ed.ac.uk/st...reatsmog52.htm

Ah yes, the old Scottish greeting "Lang may your lum reek", which isn't as bad as it sounds.