The Chartists are coming & so is snow 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 there may be some snow in London on Sunday. 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, or at least as accurate as is possible when forecasting snow.
That said you don’t need a weather forecaster to tell you that in recent times it has snowed infrequently in the Capital. A northern colleague said to me once that despite it being the middle of winter if it does actually snow in London it is headline news.
The inability of perhaps particularly London to cope with even modest amounts of snow is legendary, although one might hope that in a period of lockdown when many *should* be working from home it will be less of an issue.
The expectation of snow in London is one of the great things of London life nevertheless. People peer anxiously out of windows for signs of snow and search for reports of approaching snow (these days much easier to find with social media). In the mid-nineteenth century London, 170 years ago, when it snowed a lot more than now, it was the Chartists who got people looking out of windows, checking for any sign of impending trouble.
Suffice to say that in the revolutionary year of 1848 the Chartists did indeed come, on April 10th 1848 and on many occasions in May and June 1848 but actually they were rumoured to be coming far more often than they actually arrived.
Snow and the Chartists two of the great imponderables of London life.
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