Snow London

SNOW LONDON

A snow covered London is a rare sight, so if ever the city is blanketed, it draws excited crowds straight to the parks and open areas for snowmen building, snowball fights and all manner of excitement. The playing is often with a sense of urgency, for the city dwellers know that soon enough it will melt and very often be gone for another year. The United Kingdom is, for much of the time, in the path of the warming Gulf Stream which generally flows across from the southwest Atlantic. Also, the island status means that the country is surrounded by much slower cooling sea water, making for less severe winters than almost all the other countries lying on the same latitude. Coupled with the milder winters of recent decades, the sparse snowfalls are generally met with enthusiasm rather than irritation.

The national preoccupation with the quickly changing weather patterns experienced by those living in the United Kingdom, means that wagers are regularly placed with bookmakers as to whether a white Christmas in London is likely to happen. To win the bet, a single flake of snow needs to fall during the twenty-four hours of December 25th. The meteorological office states that London had only ten white Christmases during the twentieth century, which was slightly above average, as the city has only a six per cent probability of having a white Christmas.

In times gone by, white Christmases were more common, with snow falling and lying on the ground for months on end. From the Middle Ages to the mid nineteenth century, winter temperatures in the United Kingdom were on average lower than today, with the coldest winter recorded being that of 1684, just twenty-five years after records first began being taken. The river Thames often froze in winter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the well-documented 'frost fairs' were held. The old London Bridge aided the freezing of the river, its many broad arches acted as a dam slowing the passage of the water. The Thames froze twenty-three times between 1620 and 1816, the year when it last froze downstream of Teddington, where the river becomes tidal.  That final year of freezing, 1816, became known as the, ‘year without summer’ when London saw snow in June and July. This was a phenomenon experienced across the four compass points of the globe, which was caused by volcanic ash set high in the atmosphere, from an earlier massive explosion of a volcano in the East Indies.

The novelist Charles Dickens saw six white Christmases in the first nine years of his life, so it is hardly surprising that snow and all that comes with it, is so evocatively described in his works. Christmas cards first became fashionable in Victorian times and the snowy scenes depicted have continued through to those of the present day. Anyone wishing to recreate the joys of a typical snowy Christmas card scene, should head to Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath or Greenwich Park for the opportunity for steep hill tobogganing and snowball rolling.

There is much pleasure to be had in watching the very young enjoying their first encounter with a London snowfall. Most Londoners hold onto memories of a particularly cold winter throughout their lives. For the old living today, it is the notoriously snowy winter of 1947, the next generation remembers well the winter of 1961. Londoners in their forties will talk of the London snows of 1981-1982 and those born later remember 1990-1991. The very youngest will hold relatively fresh memories of London blanketed in the white stuff from early winter of 2009. As I sit writing these words towards the end of that same year, through the window, here in London, I see white roofs and snowflakes falling.

Where to view video clips of Snow London  and video clips of London

London in motion has some of the best London Stock Footage and London Library Footage with moving clips of many of the above mentioned places to see, are available to browse through by simply visiting the ‘Snow London’ category of this website.  New additions of London video clips are being frequently uploaded and further categories will be appearing over the coming months.