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VIKING
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6. Georgian Hedge Funds: How Greedy Landowners Enclosed Our Fields and Drove John Clare Mad

1. Weather Report

He had a horror of showing white hairy shin between sock-top and trouser cuff when sitting down, legs crossed – it was in some ways the besetting and prototypical English sartorial sin.

William Boyd, Ordinary Thunderstorms (2010)

Our weather has stayed much the same for centuries, global warming notwithstanding. It shouldn’t be surprising that related national stereotypes have remained consistent, too.

In letters sent home from the Vindolanda fort at Hexham, Northumberland, near Hadrian’s Wall, in around AD 100, Roman legionaries long for fine Italian Massic wine, garlic, fish, lentils, olives and olive oil. And they complain about the food the Picts eat – pork fat, cereal, spices and venison. Today’s Geordie diet is still some distance from the Mediterranean one.

What’s more, these Mediterranean legionaries, marooned at the northern edge of the Roman Empire, were freezing cold the whole time.

One letter from southern Gaul – the blissfully hot south of France – is addressed to a poor shivering legionary at Vindolanda, listing the contents of the accompanying package: ‘Paria udonum ab Sattua solearum duo et subligariorum duo’ – socks, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants.

Just like the rest of us, Roman soldiers needed underpants and thick socks in the frozen north, particularly if they were sun-kissed, olive-skinned Italians and Frenchmen; not robust, barely clothed Geordies, cheerfully exposing their stark white, goose-fleshed torsos to the easterly winds that whip straight from Scandinavia into Northumberland across the North Sea.

Nothing changes very much, as a quick survey of outfits in Newcastle’s Bigg Market on a gloomy Saturday night in February – compared with those worn by Italians for a sunlit winter stroll around the Colosseum – will tell you.

In AD 98, the Roman historian Tacitus said of England, ‘Caelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum; asperitas frigorum abest’ – ‘The sky is obscured by constant rain and cold, but it never gets bitterly cold.’

Tacitus was right – our climate is a temperate, rainy one. While London only gets 1,500 hours of sunshine a year (and Glasgow and Belfast, 1,250 hours), Rome basks in 2,500 hours of annual sun. Northumberland – where those shivering legionaries were stationed – gets just 1,350 hours.

It’s even worse in winter, when our northern daylight hours are that much shorter – in the whole of January, London gets forty-five hours of sunshine; Rome 130.

Our national character is dictated by figures like this. They also dictate the way the country looks – and the way we look, the way we dress, the shade of our complexion. Some linguistics experts have even suggested that the differences between the American and English accent were produced by the differing climates.¹

Brightly coloured parrots and tigers live in tropical climates; brown, black, white and grey animals – sheep, cows, rabbits – are better off further north.² And so it is with humans – we look different as we go north.

Exposed white shins aren’t a problem for natives of southern countries; southern skins never go lobster red. The strange English taste for being toasted to an uneven shade of scarlet on their summer holidays is a direct product of not getting much sun at home.

‘You get used to eating caviar and, at some point, it begins to taste as ordinary as anything else,’ Boris Becker said in 2011.

The same goes for sunshine – when you’re abroad, you don’t go in frantic search of what you already have at home; you seek out what you don’t get enough of.

Generous supplies of southern heat mean southern Europeans don’t rush to grab every second in the sun; or fling open the windows on cold winter days when a watery sun reveals itself for a moment or two, and you can see your breath indoors. Nor do they dress quite so badly – or go topless, as many Englishmen do – when the sun comes out.

In Mediterranean countries, the heat is so stitched into their souls that, in summer, they think, ‘I’ll wear my normal June/July/August clothes,’ which means light trousers, long-sleeved cotton shirts and loafers. Those used to hotter climates realize that covering up in light cotton makes you cooler, in both senses, than exposing raw flesh to the sun.

Meanwhile, the English think, ‘God, it’s hot. Let’s wear something special/ludicrous to celebrate, something that exposes as much skin as possible.’

The odd thing is that the English invented elegant, cool summerwear: linen shirts, trousers and suits. But that was when they spent a long time – often whole lifetimes – living in hotter countries. Dealing with a blistering sun on a daily basis means you’re wary of it, rather than hungrily chasing it, mad dogs and Englishmen apart. Victorian Englishmen learnt to absorb the prospect of heat into their everyday dressing routine, and do their best to avoid it.

Our poor modern fashion sense isn’t helped either by our northern puritanical streak: a fear of showing off that bleeds into a fear of dressing well, even in cold weather.

The climate also explains the relative lack of shutters in England as opposed to the Mediterranean – who needs to keep the sun out over here? That’s why our shutters are on the inside, if and when we have them – they’re used for security at night, not for providing shade during the day.

In hot southern countries, you open the inner windows and leave the outer shutters closed; in colder northern countries, you open the inner shutters in the morning, and leave the outer windows closed for most of the year.

The English awkwardness in company is also related to our climate. We simply don’t get out as much as southern Europeans: their warmer climates and longer winter days induce a chattier, more outdoors existence.

Our weather means we’ve never really embraced the Continental café society, envisaged by Tony Blair with the relaxation of licensing hours in 2005. The French and Spanish sip wine gently through the warm night, punctuating the evening with a leisurely passeggiata; we drink beer heavily, furiously and statically, huddled up indoors against the cold, desperately using drink to fuel our stilted conversations.

Bad weather explains our constitutional gloom, our tendency to play things down, and our inability to work up much excitement over anything. All human beings are sub-tropical in origin: we only left the warmth of Africa several hundred thousand years ago. With our sun-kissed, atavistic DNA, we’re still not too pleased with the grey, damp life and the short winter days that come with living more than 50 degrees north of the equator.

Because of our gloomy, northern climate, we just can’t do piazza life. Although we’ve had pedestrianized streets for almost four centuries – the Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells was the first in England, dating from 1638 – we’re not well-practised at staying calm in large open spaces after dark.

‘The British Character. Absence of the Gift of Conversation’, by Pont in Punch, 18 September 1935.

Come closing time, and pedestrianized streets across the country – like Carfax, in Oxford – become pedestrianized fighting areas. (To be fair, despite our extreme public drunkenness, we’re much less drunk in our cars than people in most other countries in the world, thanks to Draconian drink-driving laws; there are many fewer scratched cars on the street here than abroad.)

Our fevered drinking habits are also related to our relationship with the opposite sex: the English male is particularly bad at talking to the English female. That awkwardness has grown out of a long history of English gender segregation. And that has a great deal to do with early industrialization, itself related to England’s geology.

In 1985, a newspaper compared the daily lives of manual workers from Liverpool and Turin, in the light of the Heysel Stadium disaster that year. Thirty-nine Juventus fans were killed when Liverpool fans rushed towards them before the European Cup Final, causing a dilapidated retaining wall to collapse on top of the Italians.

The Liverpool manual worker lived off meat, battered fish, chips, crisps and beer; he spent all day at work, and most of the evening at the pub with his male friends. He didn’t, though, drink at lunchtime – as is the case with all English classes when at work, except on special occasions. On sunny days in St James’s Square, central London, where I often have lunch, along with hundreds of office workers, not a single one has an alcoholic drink with their sandwich.

Meanwhile, the Turin worker went home at lunchtime for pasta and veal, washed down with a carafe of red wine shared with his wife, and then spent the evening with his family.

With work days like this, Italians end up talking much more to their wives, and their children, than the English do – not just because they are generally chattier, but also because they physically spend more time in the same room as them.

In England, the Industrial Revolution – the earliest in the world – dictated the bad diet of that Liverpool manual worker; as it still does the inability to get fresh, local food in our supermarkets; and our inability, too, to set up good, cheap restaurants.

It’s been like this for a while. In 1808, the Romantic poet Robert Southey – writing under the pseudonym of Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, a supposed Spanish tourist in England – said, ‘Everywhere you find both meat and vegetables in the same insipid state … Nothing is so detestable as an Englishman’s coffee.’³

Rural peasant economies on the Continent – concentrated in those areas and countries which, unlike the north of England, weren’t rich in fossil fuels and metal ores, or hadn’t yet been industrialized – were based around smallholdings farmed by families.

Families breakfasted, lunched and dined together, either at home, like the modern Turin worker, or in the field, helped by a climate that was more conducive to al fresco living.

To break out of this peasant economy so early, as England did, was exceptional. Sir Michael Postan, the Russian-born professor, was staggered when he first came to England after the Russian Revolution, and saw the countryside: where were all the peasants with their square-faced bottles, he wondered.⁴

While Russian farmworkers were still working the fields, alongside their families, a century ago, the English worker was leaving home at dawn to go off to the factory, mine, mill or, increasingly, to the office, seeing less and less of his wife and children.

A peasant life is dictated by the seasons, too – with long periods of winter inactivity, and the working day brought to an end by dusk. Industrialization – together with gaslight and electric light – meant the working day could stretch beyond dusk and carry on regardless of the seasons.

As the English agricultural economy turned industrial in the late eighteenth century, and common land and smallholdings were increasingly enclosed for commercial agriculture, the direct family connection with the food-producing land broke down.

Food was increasingly canned and mass-produced over here, while peasant smallholdings continued across the Continent. And eating straight from the land meant eating freshly.

English factory workers not only didn’t come home until the evening, but also, after tea, they promptly packed off to the pub with their male colleagues until closing time.

Drinking-induced segregation increased after 1830, when the Beer Act – introduced by the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington – removed all tax on beer, in order to divert people from the horrors of Gin Lane. Within a year, 31,000 new pubs were built. And those pubs remained almost exclusively male for over a century; right up until the 1960s, ‘nice’ women wouldn’t go near a pub.

There are now 60,000 pubs left in Britain, although that number is rapidly falling, at the rate of forty a week. Still, though, we largely remain beer-drinkers, even if wine is catching up: the average Briton drinks more than 13 litres of pure alcohol a year, the sixteenth-highest figure in the world rankings.⁵ Of that figure, 43 per cent comes from beer – what you’d expect in a hop-growing, northern country, as opposed to a vine-growing, southern one. Only 30 per cent of our alcohol intake comes from wine, 21 per cent from spirits.

Gender segregation deepened with the Second World War and its aftermath. Men were necessarily separated from their wives and families during the fighting. Once they got home, six years’ absence had its effect. After the war, sales of garden sheds soared, as returning servicemen desperately sought a refuge from the shock of domestic life.

Plenty of us have stayed in the shed ever since – there are 11.5 million sheds in Britain, more per head than anywhere else in the world; and we spend £8.5bn on DIY every year, far more proportionally than other European countries.

Throw in schools that were largely segregated until the twentieth century – and the cult English taste for sending children away to single-sex boarding schools – and you begin to see how entrenched gender segregation is; or at least used to be. Even if schools are largely desegregated now, as are the pub and the workplace, you don’t wipe out the sociological effects of several centuries of enforced segregation that easily.

Generations of boys and girls sitting in different classrooms, of men drinking in all-male pubs and working in all-male offices, mines and factories, have a powerful effect on Homo Britannicus: he can only really socialize comfortably in the company of Femina Britannica when drunk.

We have the same awkwardness with anyone exotic or foreign, thanks to our long periods of isolation, shut away on our cold island, with its empty streets during working hours, its long working days and its grim, gauche approach to social life.

The attitude was spotted a long time ago. ‘The locals are not very social to strangers,’ Robert Southey wrote of the English in 1808.⁶

Only now, though, is this more honest picture of the awkward, aggressive, drunken English – as opposed to the polite, tea-drinking obsessive queuers of legend – beginning to feed into the foreign picture of us.

‘Liverpool and Manchester are as depressing places as you’re likely to find anywhere,’ reported Road Junky Travel, an American website, in 2010, ‘Whilst the locals can be entertaining on a good day, the weather is shit, heroin is epidemic (but meth is catching on) and you’ve got a better chance of thugs putting you in hospital for no apparent reason than in any other part of England – and that’s saying something.’

The weather also dictates our clumsy approach to sex. In an appropriately titled study of the English – La Vie en gris, or ‘The Grey Life’ – the philosopher Jacques Derrida compared ‘the Englishman’s inability to escape from the straitjacket of his inhibitions’ with the ‘skipping Frenchman’s inability to understand that the sex act is more satisfying if accompanied by a dark edge of shame’.

That attitude might explain why most public statues in France are by male sculptors, of women. In England, they’re mostly by men, of men. Nothing homosexual there – just a greater comfort taken by one Englishman in the company of another; while Frenchmen are happier in the company of women.

Italian men – brought up by extremely affectionate mothers – are that much more comfortable among women, too. Encouraged by their mothers to think they are the most wonderful men in the world, they don’t suffer from a lack of confidence in talking to the opposite sex.

Add in the English awkwardness with children; plus the phenomenon that the further north you go, the more all nationalities drink; and it all makes for a group of people who reach for the bottle to take the edge off the awkwardness.

English weather may not be extreme, but that doesn’t stop it being unique; and uniquely accommodating to plants, animals and humans.

Within the gentle extremes of our temperate climate, there is extreme variety in weather conditions. It helps that Britain is a longish, thinnish island, stretching roughly north–south across several different climate zones.

That long, thin shape means you get varying extremes of temperature across the country, whether you move east or west towards the coast, or north towards cooler weather. Spring warms up the country at different times, too, moving north at roughly walking pace.

Differences in climate across England are also produced by tiny, precise, geological idiosyncrasies. Torquay’s seafront palm trees can only survive because they’re protected by the vast expanse of Dartmoor and Exmoor to the north. Eastbourne is less windswept than neighbouring areas of Sussex, because it lies in the shelter of the 600ft hills of Beachy Head. Tennyson said of his house at Farringford, Freshwater, Isle of Wight, that it was ‘Something betwixt a pasture and a park / Saved from sea breezes by a hump of down.’

England’s urban garden squares benefit from an idiosyncratic microclimate, too. Terraced houses on all sides shelter the squares in winter; and the squares enjoy early warmth at the beginning of summer because of the greater heat of city centres. Eccleston Square, central London – nurtured for thirty years by a particularly talented plantsman, Roger Phillips, and his team – can accommodate 200 camellias, 200 climbing roses, 150 shrub roses and 30 peonies.

And the reverse is true, too: some parts of England are decidedly unsheltered. Centrepoint, the tower block at the east end of Oxford Street, in London, has its own bleak microclimate. A near-constant wind swirls round the building, even when there’s just a gentle breeze a few yards away.

Across the country there are pockets of extreme cold – frost hollows – where dense cold air sinks into natural basins, producing very low, localized temperatures in winter. You can spot these frost hollows in early autumn – leaves fall earlier in them than higher up the valley. There are notable frost hollows in Redhill, Surrey, and Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, which, despite being only fifteen miles from central London, can have temperatures that are 15°C lower.⁷ Rickmansworth’s frost pocket is produced by a railway embankment which stops cold air draining from the valley.

But these are rare cold spots in a country with an unusually benevolent climate. And the most powerful factor in producing that climate and the Englishness of English weather – and much of the Englishness of the English – is the Gulf Stream.

London is on much the same latitude (51°30’28”N) as Calgary in Canada, Kiev in the Ukraine and Irkutsk in Siberia. It could never have become the greatest, most famous city on earth if it had shared the weather conditions of those places – which aren’t warmed by the Gulf Stream. Calgary was cold enough to hold the Winter Olympics in 1988; Irkutsk, on the shores of frozen Lake Baikal, has a sub-Arctic climate, with temperatures settling at around –19°C in January.

The Gulf Stream is one of a series of wind-driven sea currents dictated by so-called thermohaline circulation, which distributes warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. In the Gulf, the air gets so hot and moist that it cooks up the hurricanes which smash into the Gulf Coast, as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005, obliterating New Orleans.

Our weather system comes from the same source, but it’s been tamed by the time it hits our shores; between August and November, the remnants of a Gulf hurricane occasionally give Britain a light battering, courtesy of the Gulf Stream, as Hurricane Katia did in September 2011. A month later, Katia carried a tree trunk all the way from the Florida Everglades to Bude, Cornwall, along Gulf Stream currents. Occasional coconuts and turtles, too, bob up and down all the way from the Gulf and end up in the Outer Hebrides, transported by those thermohaline sea currents.

It’s because of the Gulf Stream that daffodils bloom in Cornwall in spring before all other counties; it’s why parts of Cornwall don’t get their first frost until December, while other bits of the country get hit in early October. For the same reason, azaleas, rhododendrons and camellias do well in the county.

The Gulf Stream is the reason, too, why swallows fly from Africa as far north as Britain, in late spring. It explains why we have such a wide range of bird life across the country: our climate accommodates wintering birds from the north and summering birds from the south. Of the 14 million seabirds in Europe, 7 million of them – over twenty-five species – breed on the British coast.

Those warm Gulf Stream currents move up the eastern seaboard of America, to become the Atlantic Drift, the wellspring of our prevailing south-westerly wind. South-westerly winds often bring wind and rain but, still, they are warmer than the rarer east winds – which come straight from freezing Russia, with not much in the way to stop them. Wormleighton in Warwickshire – perched 500 feet above sea level, the first high ground west of the Urals – is blasted by a good deal of that cold air.

The south-westerly wind has had an enormous, if subtle, effect on how England looks, and how the English behave.

It’s because of the south-westerlies that Staines and Runnymede, south-west of Heathrow, are blighted by aircraft noise. Planes take off into the wind – on runways pointing south-west – to create greater lift.

That prevailing south-westerly wind across London used to mean that polluted air was spread east across the poorer half of the city. The phenomenon can be seen in Charles Booth’s 1889 poverty maps.⁸ The blackened areas on the map, denominating ‘Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal’, are prevalent in east London; the yellow areas – ‘Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy’ – are concentrated in the west around Kensington.

When the police first published the details of crimes committed in different areas of Britain in February 2011, the pattern remained much the same in London – with deeper poverty and more crime in the east.

Immigrants have always tended to arrive in the poorer eastern parts of London – first the Huguenots in the seventeenth century, then the Jews in the late nineteenth century and, more recently, the Bangladeshis. Thistlewaite Road, in Hackney, where Harold Pinter grew up in the 1930s in a largely Jewish area, is now mostly populated by Bangladeshis.

In London’s case, the effect is exacerbated by the Thames: east is downstream, and downstream is always the gritty, maritime, dockside end of any city; upstream tends to be up in the hills, more deeply embedded in the countryside, and richer.

From the late Middle Ages onwards, the Thames-side palaces and country houses of London spread in a westerly direction away from the city; they included Hampton Court, Richmond Palace, Osterley Park and Syon House. The western suburbs – in Surrey, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, in particular – were valued in the nineteenth century for their fresh air, purified by the south-westerlies; ever since, they have been the heartland of rich suburbia.

For decades, Essex and Suffolk, to the east of London, have been less fashionable than Oxfordshire and Wiltshire – there aren’t many Wessex Girl jokes. That’s partly because of the prevailing winds; partly because the eastern counties lead to nowhere but the sea. Counties to the north and west of London open up the great expanses of the north, Scotland, Wales and the West Country. As a result, modern transport links out of London are better to the north and west than to the east.

Oxfordshire grew prosperous in the Middle Ages because it was en route from wool-rich Gloucestershire to the port of London. Rutland, with more grand churches per square mile than any other county, benefited from drovers’ roads running to all four points of the compass.

The east–west division goes for other cities, too. If you want to head for the smarter part of any British city, you’re usually best off walking into the wind. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the eastern side of Leeds was filled with factories, while the western edge was upmarket and residential.

South-westerlies mean that harbour walls, quays and breakwaters – like the Cobb at Lyme Regis – are placed at right-angles to the prevailing wind. Sea walls run from north-west to south-east to protect boats from the wind that comes tearing in from the Atlantic. For much the same reason, the spa town of Malvern was settled on the north-eastern side of the Malvern Hills, to shelter it from the south-westerlies.

It was because of prevailing south-westerlies, too, that 2012 Olympics planners messed up their PR campaign in Portland, Dorset, home to the British sailing team. Olympic flags on the edge of the town, welcoming visitors to Portland, were almost always blown in the wrong direction by the south-westerlies. New arrivals had to read the writing on the flags backwards; it only read the right way to people leaving town.⁹

South-westerlies meant the British Navy has always been stationed at the western end of the Channel – in Falmouth and Plymouth – to get the benefit of the prevailing wind. The British Western Squadron was stationed off the western approaches to the English Channel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, too. With the wind behind the fleet, it could control the whole Channel. Any German or Dutch ship coming in the other direction had to fight against the wind.

A Spanish or French fleet coming up the west coast of the Continent was also at the mercy of the Western Squadron. When the Spanish Armada attacked in 1588, it was wrecked on the coast of Ireland and Scotland by the south-west wind – which destroyed five times more ships than Elizabeth I’s navy did. As a result, it was called ‘the Protestant Wind’, and a commemorative medal was struck, stamped with the words, ‘He blew with His winds, and they were scattered.’

Rain carried by those south-westerlies collides with the mountains and hills of highland Britain, leaving lowland Britain with much less rain. While the south-east coast gets 1,800 hours of sun a year, the Western Highlands get 1,000 hours. The moist air is forced higher and becomes less dense as the barometric pressure drops. The less dense the air, the cooler the temperature, the less moisture it can support, and the excess moisture condenses into rain.

Once the air hits the lee of the mountains, this process works in reverse: the air sinks, gets warmer and can carry more moisture. A rain shadow is formed – meaning it’s wet to the west, dry to the east. That’s why Manchester’s annual rainfall, in the north-west, is 33.67 inches; and London’s, 23.3 inches.

The effect is heightened if the descending air sucks in drier air from above the rain clouds. This is the föhn effect – named after the Föhn wind which produces oddly warm weather in the northern Alps. The föhn effect means the warmest place in Britain in January is Llandudno – seven of the last eight warmest January days in the last century have happened here. It also explains why parts of north Northumberland, the Somerset and Devon coast north of Exmoor, and the North Yorkshire coast near Whitby can be unusually warm in winter.

That pattern – of a gloomy north-west and a sunny south-east – can change in May, when the prevailing wind often turns into a north-easterly: then London gets 200 hours of sun over the month, and Tiree, in the Inner Hebrides, gets 235 hours. The north-easterlies bring cloud to eastern England and Scotland, while western Scotland is sheltered by the Highlands.

It’s only because of the Gulf Stream’s warming effect that, despite being so far north, we can have such northerly, extreme changes in season and daylight hours, and yet survive comfortably.

In 2003, David Hockney moved to Bridlington, in his native Yorkshire, after spending the previous twenty-five years in Los Angeles. There are only minor seasonal differences in daylight hours in California; and minor differences in the light effects on the landscape. But, in the north of our northerly island, those differences are enormous. Bridlington gets extremely short days in winter and 3.30 a.m. dawns in summer; the time when Hockney gets up, having gone to bed at dusk, in order to maximize his painting hours.

‘If you’re in my kind of business you’d be a fool to sleep through that, especially if you live right on the east coast, where there are no mountains or buildings to block the sun,’ says Hockney, ‘Artists can’t work office hours, can they? I go to bed when the sun goes down and wake when it starts getting light, because I leave the curtains open.’¹⁰

The variety of English weather conditions dictates which parts of England are heavily settled, which parts better suited to agriculture, which best left to semi-wilderness.

Despite that variety, a uniquely temperate combination of geographical, geological and meteorological factors makes every corner of the British Isles habitable by man.

Few places in England have such hostile climates that you couldn’t spend the night or build a house there. You might not want to live on the slopes of Scafell Pike, England’s tallest mountain, 3,209 feet above Cumbria – but it’s habitable all the same. You simply couldn’t live on Mount Everest; almost ten times higher, at 29,029 feet.

Some places, like the forests of the Weald (derived from Wald, German for forest) in Sussex and Kent, or the marshy Somerset Levels, were once a lot more inhospitable than they are now. But even these more impenetrable places were eventually settled in the Middle Ages, long after the Romans had colonized more habitable spots.

Broadly speaking, hospitable weather conditions, easily fordable rivers, and a shortage of marshes and unconquerable mountains made England the rich, advanced country it just about remains today; and one filled with settlements stretching back thousands of years.

That’s largely why England is now the sixth most densely populated major country in the world, with 401 people per square kilometre. England, with fewer wild places than Wales or Scotland, is particularly packed. Taken as a whole, the United Kingdom drops to the seventeenth most overcrowded country in the world, with 255 people per square kilometre. Only Bangladesh, Taiwan, South Korea, Lebanon and Rwanda are more crowded than England.¹¹

One of the reasons we can all squeeze in together without too much trouble is our kind, forgiving climate – we just don’t do big weather.

Yes, we might get ‘Fen Twisters’ – in June 2010, two 80ft-high, 100 mph tornadoes tore across ten miles of Norfolk. Trees were cut down and a trampoline was flicked into power lines, sparking a blackout for 300 homes. There are about thirty tornadoes a year across Britain – more per square mile than anywhere else in the world; and there are more tornadoes in Norfolk than anywhere else in Britain. But, still, it’s hardly on the level of the death and destruction of the American Midwest.

Our extremes of temperature aren’t really that extreme, either. The hottest British temperature recorded was 101.3°F in Brogdale, Kent, on 10 August 2003. The lowest was –16.96°F, on 11 February 1895, and 30 December 1995, both in Braemar, Aberdeenshire, and 30 December 1995, in Altnaharra, in the Highlands. The strongest gust of wind was 142 mph, in Fraserburgh, Kent, on 13 February 1989.

Compare these figures with the hottest place on earth, Al ‘Aziziyah, Libya, which hit 136°F in September 1922; or the coldest known temperature, –128.6°F in Vostok Station, Antarctica, in 1983; or the windiest, 253 mph on Barrow Island, Australia, during Cyclone Olivia in 1996.

The wettest day in English history was recorded during the Cumbrian floods of November 2009, when 12.3 inches of rain fell on the Met Office’s gauging station at Seathwaite in a single day. On 16 June 1995, in the wettest place on earth, Cherrapunjee, in the north-eastern Indian state of Meghalaya, it rained 61.53 inches in a day.

In 2008, the biggest earthquake in Britain in twenty-five years hit Market Rasen in Lincolnshire. Measuring 5.3 on the Richter Scale, it caused damage costing £10m. England has 300–400 earthquakes a year but, because we’re so far from the major tectonic shifts around the mid-Atlantic Ridge, the seismic effect is minimal.

Not very nice for those who have to pay for it, but still nothing compared to, say, the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,836 people and caused damage worth £60bn; or the earthquake that struck Japan in March 2011, which killed more than 10,000 people, and measured 8.9 on the Richter Scale.

It’s the gentleness of English weather, combined with its unpredictability, that makes it such a popular subject for conversation.

A Croatian friend of mine, who has lived in Oxford for a decade, still doesn’t take her coat with her on unusually warm spring days. She is so used to the constant weather in her home town, Split, that she still thinks that, if it’s warm in the morning here, it’ll be warm in the afternoon. She’s often disappointed.

In Croatia – and other countries where the weather functions like clockwork – there isn’t much point in discussing the utterly predictable. The Croatian equivalent of the Daily Telegraph wouldn’t sell many copies if it splashed its front page with the headline, ‘It’s Blooming Marvellous’, in a warm summer. Croatian summers are always warm, and rarely warm in a surprising way.

British newspapers are full of stories about the weather because it is so unreliable, if undramatic. Even the south-westerly wind – our prevailing wind – is never a dead cert: around 35 per cent of our winds are south-westerlies; with south-easterlies and north-westerlies each accounting for 20 per cent of the total; and north-easterlies taking up the remaining 25 per cent.

It’s because of that unpredictability, too, that we talk so appreciatively of sudden warm snaps, that we strip off and dive into the sea the moment the sun comes out – we know it’s not going to last. If you’re in Croatia, you can take your time undressing – you know it’s going to be sunny, not only in half an hour, but also tomorrow and the day after that, throughout the summer.

The gentleness and unpredictability of our climate make us that much more interested in it, and appreciative of it, too. If nature has a pack of deadly hurricanes and tsunamis up its sleeve, it’s something to be tamed, feared and guarded against. If it’s full of soft showers and surprising glimpses of gentle sunshine, it is a thing to be treasured, and recorded.

No other country has done so much to record its weather, and for so long. The first weather journal in the world was kept by the Reverend William Merle, a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, 670 years ago.

The paraphernalia of weather recording were mostly invented by the British, too: including the domestic barometer, the tipping rain gauge, invented by Christopher Wren in 1662, the anemometer, dreamt up after the Tay Bridge disaster in 1879, the Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder, the storm warning, the forecast, the isobar, and the Stevenson screen – those white louvred boxes on stilts that shelter measuring instruments from direct heat and sunlight, while allowing the free circulation of air.

Our temperate climate also makes the English obsessive walkers. People don’t really go for a walk in America. They go for a hike – in such a vast country, with such dramatic terrain and weather patterns, the outdoors is a rugged place to be tackled only through rugged activities like hiking, mountaineering and mountain-biking; not by something so unathletic or low-key as walking.

When I lived in New York and went for a walk upstate at the weekend, American friends were surprised that I wore the same shoes I wore to the office. They put on hiking boots, even for a half-hour potter along the dry, flat paths along the Hudson River.

They took much the same approach to bicycling. New Yorkers went for fifty-mile bike treks on Saturday, kitted out in luminous body socks and space-age, Mekon helmets. The idea of bicycling a few miles across town, in a suit, to go to work, seemed outlandish. Bicycling was an out-of-town, leisure and fitness pursuit; not a means of transport to be absorbed into your immaculate, sweat-free, urban professional life.

Because the English weather is so temperate, and the landscape so accommodating, there’s no need for walking clothes, luminous body socks or special shoes; except perhaps for the all-purpose wellie – a boot that strikes Americans as being tremendously odd. Why would you need wellies in town, where there’s no mud, they ask; and surely you need something more professional for vigorous country hiking?

The English walk long distances because nowhere really seems very far from anywhere else, and you’ll never get fatally caught out by the weather or the terrain. Epping Forest, the biggest forest in Essex, is a mere 5,500 acres – you can walk across it in one direction in an hour; in the other, in just over three hours. It hardly compares with the vast forests of South America or Russia.

One evening in 1811, the poet Shelley, after dinner with friends in London, realized he didn’t have enough money for the stagecoach to Oxford; and so he decided to walk. It’s true that dinner finished earlier in the early nineteenth century, and that Shelley had finished his last goblet of port by 6 p.m.; but, still, Oxford was no closer to London than it is today.

Setting off along the route of today’s M40 – the old sheep-droving road from Herefordshire and the Cotswolds to London, dating from the Middle Ages, when wool was England’s main commercial crop – the poet completed the fifty-five miles at a brisk 4½ miles an hour trot, arriving twelve hours later, in time for a kipper breakfast.

In August 2009, Rory Stewart, the MP and writer, had a free day and so walked from London to Oxford at almost exactly Shelley’s pace; getting up at 4.30 a.m. and arriving in the town for tea. If bad weather had interrupted his walk, it would never have been bad enough for him to stop it. And, however bad the weather might have got, he would have played it down. Playing down bad weather has been an integral part of the English walk for several centuries.

‘A walk before breakfast does me good.’

‘Not a walk in the rain, I should imagine.’

‘No, but it did not absolutely rain when I set out.’

Jane Austen, Emma (1815)

Cartoon by Nicolas Bentley, from George Mikes, How to be an Alien, 1946.

Walking has always been our thing – from the Canterbury Tales, through to the Jarrow March and the charity walks of recent years; and walking in all weathers, too, because we know the weather’s not going to be that bad.

Or not that bad, as far as we’re concerned, anyway. Those from abroad think differently. In a 1958 guide to English life, Customs on the Other Side of the Channel, the Italian writer Guido Puccio included these two essential English phrases in his glossary: ‘To cover long distances on foot – percorrere grandi distanze a piedi’; ‘Takes his walk, no matter what the weather – fa la sua passeggiata con qualsiasi tempo.’

Staying in Northern Ireland in early spring, in a rural spot between Belfast and Bangor, I went for a walk around a thickly wooded lake. As I set out, there was the faintest drizzle and, because it was warm, I didn’t bother with a raincoat, but made do with a cotton shirt and sunhat. About a third of the way round the lake, it began to pour – with all the rain sweeping in from the Atlantic that, a couple of hours later, would thud into Manchester.

I could have turned back, but it was pleasant enough, and I kept on going. By the time I got back to the house, I was soaking, water dripping off the floppy fringes of my sunhat. At the French windows stood – appropriately enough – a Frenchman.

‘Oh, that is so marvellous,’ he said, ‘A Frenchman would never go for a walk in this weather, and certainly not dressed like that.’

Like the Americans, the French – living in a country that’s part of a much bigger land mass, spreading beyond Western Europe into Asia – don’t share the English concept of going for a walk. The greater extremes of weather on the Continent, too – and the greater the care for the right sort of clothes – mean they don’t have the same approach to going for a walk in bad weather, or in everyday clothes. The practice has been going on for quite a while. In 1808, Robert Southey wrote that the English dress inadequately in the ‘dark and overclouded, quite English weather’.¹²

HARRY MOUNT

How England Made the English

Contents

1. Weather Report