Snow chaos; more on the way

The Big Freeze continues across Britain. The statistics and images are becoming more and more spectacular by the day. Highlights today include news of passengers trapped on a snow-bound train south of London for a night, people trapped in cars on the M25 motorway circling London for more than 12 hours and closure of the Forth Road Bridge near Edinburgh for the first time in its 46 year history. 4000 schools have closed their doors, some for a third consecutive day.

Gatwick Airport closed at lunchtime today and won’t open again until 10am tomorrow. However, more heavy snow began falling on the airport a few hours ago so speculation is rife that it’ll remain closed tomorrow. Edinburgh airport is also closed. Half of Eurostar services through the Channel Tunnel have been cancelled as speed restrictions slow trains travelling through the Kent countryside. In fact, at one point today about one third of all rail services nationwide were suffering delays or cancellations.


The Met Office says the current cold snap is now the country’s worst start to Winter for more than 20 years. Believe me. It’s cold here! In London today’s high reached a delightful 0⁰C before dropping back in negative territory tonight. Tomorrow’s high will be -1 °C. Here at Swiss Cottage we’ll be dusted continually by snow for the next 24 hours, accompanied by regular wind gusts. I’ll leave the final words for this blog to the Met Office. This was its snow summary at 7.00pm this evening:

Further significant snow has fallen across much of central and eastern Britain, the snow feeding well inland on the strong easterly wind. Official reports indicate more than 10 cm now in parts of southeast England, locally more, with between 20 and 30, locally 45 cm in parts of North Lincolnshire. There are fresh falls of about 20 cm in the Peak District. Elsewhere, northeast England and eastern Scotland have widespread 20 to 30 cm lying snow now, with more than 50 cm over hills.