The Chartists are coming & so is Storm Ciara in London
Hurrah for old England and liberty sweet,
The land that we live in and plenty to eat;
We shall ever remember this wonderful day,
The Chartists are coming, get out of the way.
The Chartists are Coming, Ballad, 1848
According to the weather forecast the impact of Storm Ciara on Sunday may be significant, both in the Capital and throughout the UK. The forecasts are made by professional weather forecasters, often trade union members of the professionals union Prospect, and so whatever Michael Gove may think, they both deserve to be taken seriously and are highly likely to be accurate.
The inability of perhaps particularly London to cope with even a modest element of bad weather is legendary.
On this occasion all the Royal Parks will shut for the day by official order
The expectation of bad weather in London is one of the great things of London life nevertheless. People peer anxiously out of windows for signs of it and search for reports it approaching (these days much easier to find with social media). In the mid-nineteenth century London, 170 years ago, it was the Chartists who got people looking out of windows, checking for any sign of impending disturbance
Suffice to say that in the revolutionary year of 1848 the Chartists did indeed come, on April 10th 1848, but actually they were rumoured to be coming far more often than they actually arrived.
Bad weather and the Chartists two of the great imponderables of London life.
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