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After the destruction of war came a feeling of optimism and renewal as the rebuilding began. The London County Council, formed in the previous century, now worked to restore services and to exceed what had been before; to implement new standards of health and hygiene in an almost Utopian vision of what London could be. People began to look forward into an exciting future, rather than back into the grim past.
Although in 1951 there were still bomb sites to be seen in London and the ration book was an essential part of shopping, the Festival of Britain was held, ostensibly to commemorate the Great Exhibition of a hundred years previously, but also to express the new feeling of optimism and resolve, exemplified by the modernistic design of the Festival Hall. The most popular exhibits were the Guinness clock - a mechanical fantasy - and the Skylon, an elegant tower of metal girders. Londoners had suffered from the machines of destruction, like the flying bombs, those pilotless missiles, or their successors, the V2 rockets which dived at three times the speed of sound to eradicate complete streets in an instant. But the Guinness clock was an endearing and friendly machine, like those which were building the new London. The Skylon was a mixture of building and sculpture, a finger pointing heavenward, apparently suspended in mid-air, a futuristic and aesthetic object which expressed the people’s feelings about the exciting years to come.
But there were still elements of London that would have seemed very familiar to any visitors to the original Great Exhibition. For a long time the chimneys of London had been pouring sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, and during periods of temperature inversion, these gave rise to fogs, the famous London ‘pea-soupers’. Because of the increase in industry, and also the larger number of houses able to afford coal, this problem seemed to be getting worse all the time. Things reached a crisis point, and London was subjected to a series of dense fogs (nicknamed smogs as they were supposed to be a mixture of smoke and fog) which began to kill a sizeable proportion of its inhabitants. So thick were these fogs, that it became virtually impossible to drive, and taxis found themselves on pavements, buses needed men with lanterns walking in front of them to guide them and the only way that pedestrians knew there were other people around them was because they could hear them coughing.
Towards the end of the fifties the smogs were so bad that thousands of people would die in a single day, usually the very old and the very young. The Clean Air Act of 1956, forbidding the burning of fuel that was not smokeless, was felt at the time to be authoritative and unfair by many people. But it worked, although it took time. The smogs eventually became a thing of the past, and the London air no longer smelled of soot. Ironically, at the time all this was going on, the trolley bus represented a very futuristic environmentally-friendly method of transport, although perhaps it was not seen as such at the time. They were red, double-decker buses which ran on electricity, which they picked up from double poles which engaged overhead wires.