Five Things About... London Winters Through The Centuries

Baby it's been cold outside

The view from a pub - the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping - which already existed in the era of frost fairs on the Thames, and would have seen this same stretch of river frozen over multiple times since it opened in the 1500s.

Hi everybody and welcome to your Sunday email. You’ll probably spot some differences today from recent Weekend Reads, so I’ll start with some background… 

To introduce myself, I’m Lydia 👋 I’ve been mostly behind-the-scenes with Time Machine so far, the Chewbacca to

Matt Brown

’s Solo. Now we’re doing some reshuffling of the weekly Time Machine posts - more details from Matt earlier this week here if you missed it but tl;dr:

• Wednesday’s going to keep up the in-depth dives into London’s gloriously dense past

• Friday’s going to be a short newsletter spotlighting something we loved from that week - maybe a new archeological find, exhibition review or news item

• And Sunday’s going to be a collection: basically Five Things About London’s Past We Thought Were Cool Or Interesting That We Hoped You, Also, Would Think Were Cool Or Interesting. Maybe there’s a snappier way to say that; we’ll keep workshopping it. 

I’ll be taking the wheel for the Sunday series, though I’m hoping we’ll also be getting some new voices in here (comment or email with any suggestions for people you’d like to hear from!) Sometimes it’ll still be a collection of stuff to read - or maybe there’ll be videos, podcasts, artworks, archeological finds; whatever London casts up from its historical depths that we’re most into that week.

And so on with this Sunday’s batch…

Category is: London When It’s Cold

As I’m writing this we’ve reached the part of winter where it feels like it’s been January forever and yet inexplicably there’s still some January left. So in honour of that mood I’ve been trawling through some of my favourite historical accounts of London winters past.

And actually, happily, it’s not all Eternal Night and visions of a frosty apocalypse. Londoners have been 1/ revelling in, 2/ marvelling at the magic of, 3/ finding ways to work some extreme sports into and 4/ okay, yes, often also bitching unremittingly about London winters since roughly the Dawn of Time. Here’s a handful that I enjoyed.

1183-ish: Jousting on ice - Bear-fights, bull-fights and packs of hounds being set upon boars ‘soon-to-be-bacon’... there’s a definite Game of Thrones feel to the high-energy, high-brutality picture William FitzStephen paints in his 12th century description of midwinter in Norman London. The English Historical Fiction Authors blog’s pulled out a section from the cleric’s work, A Description of the Noble City of London. 

And it’s a gory one. Love skating? Love jousting? Love mortal peril? Great news: there’s a sport for that. 

‘...Sometimes by agreement they run one against the other from a great distance and, raising their poles strike one another. One or both fall, not without bodily hurt, since falling they are borne a long way in opposite directions by the force of their own motion; and wherever the ice touches the head, it scrapes away the skin entirely. Often he that falls breaks shin or arm, if he fall upon it. But youth is an age greedy for renown, yearning for victory…’