Ice, ice, baby

What do you do when the Thames freezes solid? For the Stuarts and Georgians of London, the great frosts that descended on the city meant wrapping up and making merry

- Deborah Nicholls-Lee

TREES split 'as if lightning-struck' and the seas were 'so locked up with ice, that no vessels could stir out or come in', recorded 17th-century diarist and courtier John Evelyn during the Great Frost of 1684. The biting cold caused misery and hardship, but, on the frozen River Thames, a 'bacchanalian triumph' was lifting spirits, he wrote, as 'a carnival on the water' drew intrepid pleasure seekers to its glassy surface.

Between 1607 and 1814, the Thames froze over some two dozen times, prompting seven major 'frost fairs', as these gatherings became known, and numerous minor ones. A procession of stalls fashioned from blankets and the ferrymen's now redundant oars were thrown up on the Thames, which acquired the moniker 'Freezeland Street'. The festivities drew everyone to the ice, from peasants to princes, enticed by the jolly atmosphere, libations and wide-ranging diversions: skating, football, horse and coach races, bear-baiting and fox hunting, as well as puppet shows and plays performed on the decks of stranded barges. Indeed, the whole extravaganza had a theatricality about it. 'Behold the Wonder of this present Age, A Famous RIVER now becomes a Stage,' announced a woodcut sold on the river in 1684. 'Question not what I now declare to you, The Thames is now both Fair and Market too.'

Wider and shallower than today, the Thames froze more easily, particularly between London and Blackfriars bridges, the piers of which slowed the water. In some places, the ice was so thick that oxen and sheep were roasted over an open fire. 'All sorts of men, women, and children went boldly upon the ice,' wrote chronicler Edmund Howes in 1611. 'Some shot at prickes [archery], others bowled and danced' or 'set up boothes and standings upon the ice, as fruit-sellers, victuallers, that sold beere and wine, shoemakers, and a barber's tent....'