Londoners are also more accustomed to the cold than to the heat of summer days. “There’s nothing left but London once it’s winter,” says a character in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949). London becomes more purely itself in the cold, harder and brighter and far more cruel. In the winter of 1739-40 “Tramps froze to death … Birds dropped stiff from the sky, bread hardened into rocks on market stalls.” Thirty years later, according to the Annual Register of 18 February 1771, “A poor boy who on Tuesday night had crept into a dunghill at a stable yard in London in order to preserve himself from the cold was found dead by the ostler” while “A poor woman also, with a child at her breast, and another about three years old lying by her, was found in Rag Fair.”
The cold weather could be so intense that the Thames itself froze regularly over the centuries, some twenty-three times between 1620 and 1814, because the old London Bridge impeded the movement of the water until it became so sluggish that, in the colder conditions, it could not move. In 1281 “men passed over the Thames, between Westminster and Lambeth,” and in 1410 “Thys yere was the grete frost and ise and the most sharpest wenter that ever man sawe, and it duryd fourteen wekes so that men might in dyvers places both goo and ryde over the Temse.” In 1434, 1506 and 1515 the river was again frozen so that carts and horses and carriages could travel easily from one bank to the other. As early as 1564 such sports as archery and such entertainments as dancing took place at a Frost Fair on the frozen river. Stow and Holinshed record that, on the eve of 1565, “some plaied at the football as boldlie there, as if it had been on the drie land; diverse of the Court being then at Westminster, shot dailie at pricks set upon the Thames; and the people, both men and women, went on the Thames in greater numbers than in anie street of the City of London.” So the Thames becomes a newly populous thoroughfare in the greatly expanding city. The emphasis here is upon excitement and recreation but forty-four years later, in 1608, the general atmosphere of trade and commerce in London had exploited even the weather, and many set up booths “standing upon the ice, as fruitsellers, victuallers, that sold beere and wine, shoe makers and a barber’s tent.” Again in 1684, “The Thames before London was still planted with booths in formal streets, all sorts of trades and shops furnished” so that “another city, as it were, was erected thereon.” The city spawns its own replica, with all the characteristics of its own turbulent life-“bull baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, cookes, tipling and other lewd places, so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph or carnival on the water.” The perilousness of London life, too, was enacted upon the river, when within hours the ice had melted and swept the whole carnival away; a century later, in 1789, a “sudden breaking up of the ice” occasioned a “fearful scene” of damage and fatality.
The cold winters of London impeded the course of trade as well as that of the river. In the winter of 1813-14, the wax and glue froze in their pots, leaving tailors and shoe-makers without the means of work. Silk deteriorated in freezing conditions, so the silk-makers of Spitalfields and elsewhere were also severely affected. Porters and cab-men, street traders and labourers, were unable to pursue their livelihoods. The price of coal and the price of bread were dramatically increased. The master of a school in St. Giles reported “that of the seventy children in his school sixty had not eaten any food that day until he gave them some at noon.” In the severe winters of 1855, 1861, 1869, 1879 and 1886 there were bread riots, and in the latter year mobs of the unemployed looted the shops of central London. In the city there was a direct correlation, then, between weather and social unrest.
There is a connection, too, between outer and inner weather. In the winter “there is a vague smell of alcohol in the streets” since everyone “drinks heavily and incessantly” to combat the aching and intrusive cold. The drink “excites and urges on the rabble to vicious practices.” This account, written in 1879, describes the rain falling like liquid mud, the yellow shadows of the fog which render breathing painful and difficult, and the darkness at midday. The description of a physical fact conveys an immense psychological charge. “Vile” weather at Christmas 1876, according to Henry James, “darkness, solitude and sleet in midwinter” within a “murky Babylon.” November was the worst month for suicides in London and, during the Blitz of the winter of 1940-1, Londoners were more depressed by the weather than by the air-raids.
The sky in London, like its weather, seems to have different orders of magnitude. In some streets, which are the canyons of the city, it seems infinitely remote; it becomes a distant prospect continually crowded by rooftops and towers. Yet in the large squares of Islington where the houses are low, and in the council “cottage” estates of the western districts, the sky is a vast canopy encompassing all the adjacent areas. In “this low damp city,” as V.S. Pritchett put it, “the sky means a great deal to us.” The quality of cloud cover which may or may not bring rain, and the subtle gradations of blue and violet in the evening sky, are sensible reminders of the unique atmospherics of London. A panorama of London from Southwark (c. 1630), is the first view that grants the city its sky; the westward passage of grey and white clouds gives the painting enormous space and lightness, and in this novel brightness the city itself seems to breathe. It is no longer the tangle of dark buildings beneath a narrow strip of sky but an open city whose towers and spires beckon towards the empyrean.
These are the vertiginous skies when at sunset the west is all on fire, reflected in the shifting mass of cloud; on one January evening, at approximately five o’clock, in the year 2000, the cloud cover was rose-red striated with patches of dark blue sky.
Yet the lights of the sky also reflect the lights of the city, and the very brightness of the modern city obscures the brightness of the stars. That is why the typical London sky seems low, damp and tactile, part of the city itself and its thousand stray lights and gleams. It is the sky which inspired Turner living in Maiden Lane, and Constable in his lodgings in Hampstead. According to G.K. Chesterton, “all the forces which have produced the London sky have made something which all Londoners know, and which no one who has never seen London has ever seen.”
The prevailing wind is westerly or south-westerly; the south and west façades of St. Paul’s Cathedral show marked deterioration in the face of wind or rain, and the stone itself “is washed clean and exhibits a whitened and weather-beaten aspect.” Yet these winds kept the western areas of the city relatively free of the fog or smog which settled over the central and eastern part. Indeed an eastern wind was a token of harm, since all the smoke and stench of the industries situated in the East End filtered over the rest of the capital.
London was, and is, a very windy city. By the eleventh century there were seven windmills erected in Stepney, while the earliest maps show windmills in Moorfields and Finsbury Fields. There was a windmill in the Strand, and one by Leather Lane; there was one in the Whitechapel Road, and one beside Rathbone Place. Great Windmill Street is still at the top of the Haymarket, and there were many windmills along the south side of the river in Waterloo, Bermondsey, Battersea and the Old Kent Road. In February 1761 the wind was so high that, in Deptford, it drove a windmill “with such velocity that it could not be stopped, and took fire, and was entirely consumed, besides a large quantity of flour.” John Evelyn recorded that “the Town of Bowe” had continual winds which mitigated the effects of atmospheric pollution and Charles Dickens wondered why metropolitan gales always blew so hard at Deptford and Peckham. In addition, “I have read of more chimney stacks and house-copings coming down with terrific smashes at Walworth.”