Historical newspaper reports describing the big freeze in London in the winter of 1814
With the predicted snow and ice all set to turn much of the UK into a ‘retreat from Moscow’ landscape, we thought we’d post some old newspaper stories about the freezing of the River Thames, back in January 1814.
There are certainly some striking and surreal images described in these stories – not least of which is the poor pig, stuck on an ice floe and drifting down the river…
There are dozens of fascinating stories about the big freeze of January 1814. To find these stories, just do a search for ‘ice’, and then choose January 1814 and London from the ‘date’ and ‘region’ filtering options respectively.
By clicking on the images below, you can explore articles pertaining to the 1814 freeze. You can click to enlarge each image: scroll through the images by using the arrows on either side of an image or view them as a slideshow by clicking the play button at the bottom of the image viewer. Click the (i) in the image viewer to learn what newspaper an article was printed in; the newspaper title is hyperlinked and will take you to the full article on The British Newspaper Archive.
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2 comments On The Freezing of the River Thames – January 1814
On 24 Jan 1814 – exactly 199 years ago today – the Morning Chronicle published a letter suggesting snow be piled up by the sewers and then heated up to try to prevent the runoff causing floods. Elsewhere it prints the suggestion that snow is gathered into large piles, so that it melts more slowly, again to alleviate flood damage. Did the press not report today [24 Jan 2013] that the Met Office recommended we build snowmen for the same reason?
Hi Chrisine, wow, what a brillaint idea! So I guess we should be building snowmen near drains, etc. Regards, Grant.