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.”
Yet in a city established upon extremes, there will also be an extremity of weather. In 1090 six hundred houses, and a score of churches, were overthrown by a mighty wind. The spectacle of Bow Church rafters impaled twenty feet deep within the mud and stone of Cheapside inevitably led to demands for public penance and humiliation to avert the further wrath of God. But the pious citizens of London were not able to turn away the further calamities of their history. In 1439 there came a “grete wynd that dyd a moch harme in many placys”; it tore off the lead roof of the Grey Friars and “it blew almost dovne the ton side of the Old Change” knocking down so many “grete long trees that nether horss ne cart myght pass thorow the streete.” In 1626 “a terrible storm of Rain and hail … with a very great Thunder and Lightning” knocked down the wall of the churchyard of St. Andrew, and exposed many coffins in the crash. It says something about the attitude of Londoners to death that thereupon “the ruder sort” lifted up the lids of the coffins “to see the posture of the dead Corps lying therein.” During this storm a strange mist emerged above the turbulent waters of the Thames “in a round Circle of a good-bigness above the waters” which eventually “ascended higher and higher till it quite vanished away.” There was immediately talk of conjuring and black magic.
