Colourless London

Colourless London

by akgiacoman

Colourless London

Your Project Page Picture Caption

Abstract

"A London Full of Colour" is a project that aims to portray a different reality of the daily life of London citizens. By picturing different scenarios in their reality comparing them to the reality that I choose for each one of them, the audience will be able to admire the beauty and uniqueness of the city from a different perspective. I have gone to international poetry competitions and taken painting and photography courses before arriving to college. This project will combine my favorite forms of expression through art and hopefully brighten the days of the viewers. The main message I wish to convey is that every single one of us chooses the reality they want to live in, meaning that the same place could be seen as a prison for our souls or a wonderland for our imagination. The goal of this Milestone, however, is to display London as it is and to capture through pictures emotions displayed by people walking by or admiring the landscape. Pictures are taken from different perspectives and represent feelings of an average citizen living daily life. In the same way, this milestone explores the influence and relationship between the London weather and psiquis of the Londoners.

Introduction

London is a "world city" that encompasses many cultures, religions, forms of governance and mindsets distributed across the ages that complete its history. London is a marvelous place full of corners to discover, however, since ages ago, it has been covered by a sometimes unwanted and disturbing presence; the fog. Caused by the Thames, the fires, the pollution and the filth, the fog has become part of the identity of the city of London, England. Emerging in the early nineteen century and covering several nearby towns, the London fog was both, a source of inspiration and fear. As the artistic component of the city was being used to its full potential by geniuses like Monet and Dickens, the criminality rates were also rising due to the anonymity granted to many by the blurry fog. Whether it was an element of romanticism, mystery or terror, the weather in London is an iconic representation of the relationship of how these kinds of conditions sometimes determine the identity of a city and the behavior of its population. In this Milestone this relationship and its social, cultural, and psychological repercussions are exposed through the background as the reader is invited to explore the history of the fog, to better understand the later creative component that is captured in the pictures taken of some of the most iconic and well-known sites in the city.

Section 1: Background

Weather in London

The Central England Temperature (CET) monthly series, beginning in 1659, is the longest continuous temperature record in existence . The following pictures show the average temperature on the different seasons of the year of the UK since the sixties, this information was taken from a report published in 2009 titled "The climate of the United Kingdom and recent trends". The report took information mainly from the CET to construct the graphics. In terms of record warm individual days, 10 August 2003 saw the hottest ever maximum temperature in the UK; 38.5 oC at Faversham, Kent, exceeding the previous record in 1990 by 1.4 degrees Celsius. Though the temperature record does not go that far back, the growing of grapes in the medieval period has been used to imply that current warm temperatures in England have been experienced before. However, Jones and Mann note in their article that “past vine growing in England reflects little, if any, on the relative climate changes in the region since medieval times”. As seen in the images, there has been an increase in the temperature of the United Kingdom overall. Now, in terms of rain, annual mean precipitation over England and Wales has not changed significantly since 1766. Seasonal rainfall is highly variable, but appears to have decreased in summer and increased in winter, although with little change in the latter over the last 50 years. Severe windstorms around the UK have become more frequent in the past few decades, although not above that seen in the 1920s. The graphics that go from yellow to navy blue, show the degrees of precipitation (rain) all across the UK in the same period of time. In the Images it can be seen how much the temperatures varies from season to season as well as how it changes as years pass.

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  1961-1990 average daily mean temperature (°C)

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  1961-1990 average daily mean temperature (°C)

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  1971-2000 average daily mean temperature (°C)

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  1971-2000 average daily mean temperature (°C)

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  Change in daily mean temperature (°C) from 1961-1990 to 1971-2000

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  Change in daily mean temperature (°C) from 1961-1990 to 1971-2000

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  Change in daily mean temperature (°C) from 1961 to 2006 based on a linear trend

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  Change in daily mean temperature (°C) from 1961 to 2006 based on a linear trend

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  1961-1990 average total precipitation amount (mm)

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  1961-1990 average total precipitation amount (mm)

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  1971-2000 average total precipitation amount (mm)

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  1971-2000 average total precipitation amount (mm)

The London Fog

The Source of the Issue

In most parts of the world, fog is seen as just a natural phenomenon, "clouding the air with small particles when the natural conditions are right". The London fog was born by the early 1800s, because of the increasing pollution of the air caused by the smoke coming out of the wood fires used for burning sea coal. . Small manufactories were all around the city and larger polluters accumulated near the rivers. Glass makers, breweries, potteries, tanneries and domestic coal fires, all contributed to the atmosphere of noxious fumes."The city's rapid expansion multiplied the number of domestic coal fires and mingled their smoke as it poured out into the atmosphere with the noxious emissions of factory chimneys and workshops in the early stages of the industrial revolution in the capital." So then a battle to remove the fog began when in 1819, Michael Angelo Taylor, MP of Durham, demanded the Parliament to take action to mitigate the issue. In response to this, a select committee was formed to discuss if smoke was dangerous to health and if there was anything that could be done about it. Taylor put a lot of effort into his cause and brought to the sessions arguments that now are logical to us but, in that time, were absurd. Arguments like that factory owners should make adaptations and buy new machines and that tis would not only be beneficial to the city to to them as well, in a long term of course. He was also amongst the first to suggest that the black fog was harmful to public health and it carried diseases. However, there were dissenting voices; manufacturers argued that smoke only represented a minor inconvenience. Some even dared to claim that smoke "disinfected" the air from the smell of the drains. Even Robert Angus Smith, who discovered acid rain in 1859 strongly believed that tough the sulfurous acid contained in the smoke was capable of damaging buildings, it treated miasma. As a result of these popular believes, Taylor had very little success in the parliament, however, he set a precedent and his claims were later supported by scientific data and medical evidence.

Several others followed Taylor's steps with almost no success at all until the Clean Air Act finally killed the fog in 1962. According to an article published by the American Lung Association, thanks to the Clean Air Act, this year's "State of the Air" report found that the percentage of people that live in locations with high risk to their health due to air pollution decreased from 52 percent to 40 percent. We should all be alarmed about potential rollbacks of Clean Air Act regulations and proposed cuts to EPA's budget. "The progress in public health protections brought to us with the Clean Air Act have saved hundreds of thousands of lives." However, even though the deathly London fog "died" with the Clean Air Act, it is something to take care of still today, because development and growth have not stopped and nobody would want them to. By the beginning of the year 2017, the news agency CNN released an article where they announced; "London breached its annual air pollution limits five days into the new year, Mayor Sadiq Khan said Friday.". Nitrogen dioxide is a gas emitted by diesel engines that causes lung disease and respiratory problems. European Union law stipulates that a maximum nitrogen dioxide concentration of 200 micrograms per cubic meter must not be exceeded for more than 18 hours over the year. Despite this, Brixton Road exceeded this limit since the first week of the year. This only shows that the struggle that Londoners dealt with back in the nineteen century is still somewhat present today.

Severity

In the book "Dirty Old London", it is emphasized how severe the problem of the fog started to become by the end of the nineteenth century. "The most wretched poor were passing on an ever-accumulating collection of physical and mental defects to their rickety children. This dark parody of Darwinian evolution gained great credence when thousands of young men new turned away for service in the Boer War on grounds of their poor physical condition. Smoke and fog were high amongst the possible culprits for what seemed a disturbing decline in physical strength." Judging from the author's perspective, it is visible how the fog, besides causing physical damage to the citizens of London, became as well a social issue. As mentioned later in the book, in the diary of George Gissing, for January 1888, he complains about the fog in a most depressing way of manifesting his misery.

"Mond. Jan. 9. Hideous fog; bad cold...
Tuesday. Jan. 10. Fog still; cold worse...
Wed. Jan. 11. Fog denser than ever. Cold so much worse, had to lie up in house...
Thursd. Jan. 12. A terrible day; the fourth that we have not seen the sky.
Frid. Jan 13. Fog hanging about still, until 3 in afternoon. Then clearing...
Sat. Jan. 14. Black fog at noon, then cleared, and at night tanked heaven for showing its stars once more...
Thursd. Jan. 19. Cold and cloudy. Must be several weeks since it was a single gleam of sunlight."

The queen Elizabeth I herself complained about the hideous fog saying that she found "herself greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke of sea coals". And though in the economical side, London was the very source of development for England and "a financial and mercantile hub for the world", it was, at the same time, one of the most filthy capital cities the world has ever come to know, even today. This is often attributed to the rapid population growth between the eighteen and the nineteen hundreds. The population in London increased from about a million to over six million citizens, "suburbia replaced green fields, crushing up the country in its concrete grasp". As a result, the filth increased and with it, the diseases spread more rapidly and the fog turned the city into complete darkness for days during the winter times, which, at the same time, increased the criminality rates."The capital ended the century with the nickname of "The Smoke"- a city named after its most enduring pollutant."

"The Doom of the Great City", a book published in 1880, also describes in great detail how the majority of central London was "choked to death" by toxic fog, and even further, how people cared very little about solving the problem. "Londoners were well accustomed to the inconvenience of fogs, and looked upon them in the light of a regular institution, not caring to investigate their cause with a view to some means of mitigating them." However, in that time, very little was known about the terrible consequences of long term exposure to the contamination in the fog. It was not until about the 1840's when the sanitary movement started tackling the smoke issue.

From a Londoner Perspective

It is not hard to understand how tired some Londoners must have been of the filthiness and the fog, seeing such an impotent city swallowed by the mirk of the smoke. "By the end of the (19th) century, the pall of smoke and fog over the metropolis seemed inescapable, and Londoners were designated to its presence. Parliament would not act; householders were apathetic. Late-Victorian "degenerationists" argued that vitiated air and lack of sunlight were creating an underclass of slum-dwellers, atrophying in the darkness." However, it was often commented by tourists that Londoners had grown used to living among the infamous filth and had learned to adapt to their circumstances, tolerating the presence of the fog, the, hideous rotting smell and the mud of the river. "An American town-bred lady would as soon think of swimming up the Thames against tide as walking far in such ankle-deep mud."

Even the ladies of the upperclass were advised to wash their faces several times a day to remove the layer of soot that accumulated in the skin "if one lives in dear, dirty old London, or in any smoky city, three times a day is none too often". However just as Jack London said in 1903, "The color of life is grey and drab. everything is helpless, hopeless unrelieved, and dirty. The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic. Strange, vagrant odours come drifting along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like grease than water from the heavens.".

Weather's influence

People have always wondered how exactly does weather impact someone's mood. Is it possible that heat makes people more aggressive? Does rain makes people sad? Or is it just another of Hollywood's tools? How about cold temperatures? Some professors and psychologists claim to have the answer for some of these inquiries. An article published in 2008 states that several contributors found that weather’s daily influence has more of an impact on a person’s negative mood, rather than helping one’s positive mood. "Higher temperatures raise a person with a low mood up, while things like wind or not enough sun made a low person feel even lower.". This means that people are more heavily influenced in a negative way by weather than in a positive way. Likewise, researcher Marie Connolly found that women who were interviewed on days “with more rain and higher temperatures [reported] statistically and substantively decreasing life satisfaction, consistent with the affect results.” Though these results are not entirely attributed to weather, because of all the factors that may have influenced, the relationship between weather and a person's mood should not be completely discarded either. This being said because there is a study from the same year that analyzed six weather parameters: temperature, wind power, sunlight, precipitation, air pressure, and photoperiod and compared them to mood. Combining these weather parameters, they found no general tie to rainy or sunny days; however, they did find a slight correlation of the intensity of mood reported by each individual. Which means that people tend to had their emotions feeling more intensified in extreme weather conditions such as too much sunlight or too much rain. And even though short term relationships between the weather and someone's emotions couldn't be stated, it has been proven that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is real and it affects people in the United Kingdom and Ireland because they are situated in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere."Without sufficient levels of morning light our bodies circadian rhythms are not triggered and our body fails to produce the hormones required to feel wide awake. During the day if we do not receive enough sunlight we feel sluggish, lethargic and low in energy and at night we stay awake long after darkness which can result in lack of sleep, disrupted sleep patterns and mood swings." In summary, if a person does not receive sunlight at the correct times and in sufficient quantities, the symptoms of SAD ensue. The symptoms of SAD recur regularly each winter and usually start between September and November, continuing until March or April and are as displayed in the image to the right.

Just in the same way researchers have come to the conclusion that excessive rain is linked with feelings of discomfort and depression, it also has had to do with violent behaviors. Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley analyzed 60 previous studies on U.S. violent crime rates, historical uprisings and empire collapses, recent wars and lab simulations testing police decisions of when to shoot — and what they found was a link between violence and heat, as well as extreme rainfall. For every standard deviation of change, occurrences of “intergroup conflict” rose by a whopping 14 percent, while instances of “interpersonal violence,” which includes rape and domestic violence, increased by four percent.

Artistic Component

Despite the widespread social anxiety caused by the fog, many artists found in it a source of inspiration from a wide broad of perspectives. For some fog represented a looming presence, alive and malignant. The majestic London soon became a city where "no beautiful thing, on which art and trouble has been bestowed, can long keep its beauty".

Section 2: Deliverable

Additional Image

The Setting

(reasons why these places were chosen for this project and comments on the pictures taken of the place. Will contain links to articles for each one)

Gallery

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  Caption 1

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  Caption 2

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  Caption 3

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  Caption 4

Conclusion

In this section, provide a summary or recap of your work, as well as potential areas of further inquiry (for yourself, future students, or other researchers).

External Links

If appropriate, add an external links section