A link to the Wikipedia article on 'Pea Soup', the kind of smog prevalent in London in the 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog http://en.wikipedia.o

A link to the Wikipedia article on 'Pea Soup', the kind of smog prevalent in London in the 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog "The result was that visibility could be down to a metre or so in the daytime. Walking out of doors became a matter of shuffling one’s feet to feel for road curbs, etc." And form the article, based in 1962 (though things were surely better by then overall): "More than once the bus I rode to work had to be led by a policeman walking on the road with a red flashlight, so thick were the greasy, sulfur-dioxide-laden pea-soup fogs that in 1962 were so bad as to send people by the hundreds to hospitals some days." LA, Beijing... if not good, probably a lot better than this era and location.