When winter really was winter: the last of the London Frost Fairs.

[dipsydoodle]

On 1 February 1814, Londoners awoke to find that after weeks of bitter chill, drifting snow and a fog which resembled “darkness that might be felt”, the Thames had ground to an icy halt over a 1,000m stretch between Blackfriars and London Bridge.

The capital’s inhabitants responded by settling down to a raucous and bibulous mid-winter party in the shape of a five-day Frost Fair.

In a meteorological event which seems unthinkable from the vantage point of the relentlessly soggy winter of 2014, London and much of England was gripped by temperatures which fell to -13C, bringing chaos as roads became blocked with snow to depths of 6ft. Tales were legion of mail coaches becoming trapped in drifts and the poor, unable to afford coal, freezing in their homes.

But in the midst of wintry misery, a brief respite was afforded as the flow of the Thames in central London slowed, ice floes formed and finally on the morning of 1 February the principal means of transportation for the wealth of the emerging British Empire became a frozen pleasure gardens. Within hours, boatmen deprived of their normal living derived from ferrying passengers across the river had set up signs declaring it was safe to walk across the ice.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/when-winter-really-was-winter-the-last-of-the-london-frost-fairs-9100338.html

[Sheldon Cooper]

1. Interesting.

The Frost Fair must have been a much-welcomed diversion from the bitter cold misery.