London's weather and the everyday: two centuries of newspaper reports

Abstract

This study surveys 200 years of London’s weather and its public reporting in newspapers to reveal some of the recurring modes of reporting and linguistic styles that are used to describe and make sense of the human experience of weather. These modes include: the cultural anxieties prompted by ‘unusual weather’; the visual dramas of ‘great storms’; the weather as culpable; and bench-marking extreme weather. Even as the broader processes and patterns of our climate are changing, at the level of the everyday the human and cultural experience of weather remains remarkably familiar.