I live in a twelfth-floor Central London flat. The flat has long, tall windows facing west and north. Talking to people on the phone, I stare across the city and the sky. The vista usually provides a backdrop to the conversation. Often, though, it’s the conversation’s subject: I tell friends what weather they will have in twenty minutes, warning those in Hackney that long, vertical walls of rain are gliding towards them over Islington and Dalston, or assuring those caught in a West End shower that the broad shafts of sunlight I can see sweeping northwards from Big Ben will hit them soon. During public events—jubilee fly-pasts, test matches, May Day demonstrations—the television becomes a shared chart or crib sheet: I can reference the blimp or helicopter that I know is on my interlocutor’s screen as well as mine and tell him or her that two hundred feet to its east the cloud that’s worrying the umpire’s light meter gives over to blue skies in St. John’s Wood, or that the rioters and police we’re watching battling it out in Oxford Street will shortly be united by a drenching.
Weather and communication: that is the two-fold promise modern London’s airspace makes. Aerials and phone-masts pick up, decode, encode and transmit again through clouds that swallow and regurgitate them or slide by above them scanning roofs and streets like barcode. When viewed from high up, London invites commentary, interpretation and prognosis—more so than other cities due to its ever-changing climate. Weather and communication, weather and telecommunication: the tallest (and hence most weather-enveloped) building visible from my flat is the British Telecom Tower. Although built a decade and a half before 1979 (and christened the Post Office Tower), the building owes its present name and status to that year’s election and its aftermath. In 1981 Margaret Thatcher’s government separated BT from the Post Office; in 1984 they floated BT as a PLC, selling 50.2 percent of its shares to the public. Throughout the eighties, though, and to the present day, the Tower has remained closed to the same public who own it. Technically, the Tower is what is known as a Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) Switching Center—one of the world’s very first. Staring at it day in and day out, month after month as it lights up, looms out of fog, bounces sunlight, dodges lightning and gets drubbed by hail, I like to fantasize that in its upper floors sit gods, or at least priests, who modulate all of the city’s sky’s flows, who set its pulse-rate, write its code and flip its switches. When London is studied centuries from now by alien terrologists, this building and not Saint Paul’s will be identified as its religious heart, its spire.
Weather, communication, code, interpretation, influence: these things have always gone together. For both Seneca and Aristotle, the airy region was a region of conveyance, of transferral and translation, in which “meteors” or atmospheric phenomena (meteor means “elevated,” “lofty” or “sublime”) were produced by the influence of the celestial sphere on the sublunary one. For Virgil, too, weather told a coded tale of influence, of cause and effect, and hence was decryptable: his Georgics describes a world of signs in which the movement of ants, swallows, frogs, and ravens can be read and interpreted, as can the appearance of the clouds, sun and moon. Seventeenth-century English Puritans treated the sky as a switchboard connecting them to God, divining portents in its storms and lightshows. The anonymous author of the 1641 text A Strange Wonder, or, The Cities Amazement (subtitled News from Heaven) describes exceptional meteorological events as God’s “signes and Tokens,” “prodigious ensignes,” “ominous harbingers,” “Cyphers,” “notable Messengers.” Londoners were so addicted to such Cyphers that, according to Defoe, during the plague years they scoured the clouds constantly for “shapes and figures, representations and appearances.” It’s standard to think of the atmosphere as a medium, a “pervading or enveloping substance” (indeed, the terms “air,” “ether,” and “environment” all appear in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the word medium), but we should go further. Weather is, and always has been, more than just a medium: it is also media.
Shakespeare understood this. In The Tempest, that great play about the weather, Caliban tells Trinculo and Stephano that the island’s atmosphere is “full of noises, sounds and sweet airs,” the humming of “a thousand twangling instruments” and “voices.” He could be describing radio. Caliban is not so much consuming and decoding these transmissions as feeling them billow around him, finding form and losing it again, like clouds. The weather is a teaser. “Weather writes, erases and rewrites itself upon the sky with the endless fluidity of language; and it is with language that we have sought throughout history to apprehend it,” writes Richard Hamblyn in The Invention of Clouds. Easier said than done, though. Aristotle knew that epagoge, or linguistic reasoning, would never yield meteorological certainty; the best it offers us is speculation. Vladimir Janković, author of Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, points out that since meteoros, “rising,” can refer to rising wind within the stomach, meteoro-logeo means not only “talk of high things” but also “windy speech,” “high talk,” “empty musings.” Shakespeare understood this too, as Hamlet’s ability to make the verbose Polonius see in the same cloud a whale, a weasel and a camel testifies. Hamlet’s deliberate mobilization of language’s powers of indeterminacy is linked to weather throughout: “when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,” he claims—an utterance that Claudius’s spies and twentieth-century critics alike will busy themselves trying, and failing, to decipher.
When language grapples with the weather there is slippage and there is displacement. Johnson’s quip that “when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather” is an easy one to make; Gwendolen’s intuition (in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest) that “whenever people talk about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else” is much more astute. For centuries manuals and charts have tried to map meteorological phenomena onto social ones, from The English Chapmans and Travellers Almanack for the Year of Christ 1697 (which aligns the ten-week frost with the gunpowder plot, the time when “the whole heaven seemed to burn with fire” with the invention of the art of printing) to Election Weather Tables compiled by today’s Met Office (Labour only wins in fair weather, apparently; that fateful day in 1979 was foul) or the Weather-to-Stock Market Correspondence Graphs studied by the more esoteric among our economists. The weather unfolds endlessly across non-meteorological discourses, across Other Stuff. It’s an index both of truth and of all that’s random, meaningless. Like all media, it bears a plethora of messages—perhaps even the message—while simultaneously supplying no more than conversational, neutral, white noise.
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Lying almost exactly on the line that runs between my windows and the British Telecom Tower is the London Weather Centre. It’s been there, on Clerkenwell Road, since 1992. In 1996, one year before the weather-change that would reverse/consolidate (delete as you deem appropriate) the political winds blowing since 1979, its parent institution, the Met Office, went down the same road as BT had twelve years previously and became a trading fund. A digital and free-market analogue to the Mount Pleasant postal depot round the corner, the London Weather Centre acts as a big sorting office, receiving, separating, ordering and redirecting meteorological information that’s come in from all around the country and the world, tailoring it to suit various clients’ needs. So football stadia in Sunderland and Portsmouth, aerodromes in Glasgow, electricity and gas stations in Anglesey and Norfolk all receive prognostic bulletins from the London Weather Centre—even if the source-data behind those bulletins was gathered not two miles from the stadium, aerodrome or station. It’s only official weather-data if it’s passed through London. This pattern stretches back four hundred years. With the explosion in the seventeenth century of a new, popular, cheap-to-produce media form, the pamphlet, people started sending in to London endless weather reports. They had great titles: A Report from Abbingdon towne in Berkshire, being a relation of what harme Thunder and Lightning did on Thursday last upon the body of Humphrey Richardson, a rich miserable farmer. With Exhortation for England to repent; or A Full and True Relation of the Strange and Wonderful Apparitions which were Seen in the Clouds upon Tuesday Evening at Seven of the Clock. Why did their authors send them here? Because they craved inclusion in the next issue of Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the London-based Royal Society. Being reprinted there made the texts “official” and “legitimate,” conferring what Janković calls “visibility within the national republic of letters.”
Initially, these reports were event-based, for the good reason that weather was conceived not as a system but rather as a set of discrete occurrences. By the mid-seventeenth century word had reached London of the Italian stage designer Giacomo Torelli’s magnificent, multi-canopied cloud-sets, in which rolls of painted cumulus were lowered and raised by ropes and pulleys: the real weather, too, was thought of in spectacular, theatrical terms. Edward Ward describes in British Wonders the “scene” in which “strange coruscations in the skies” appeared “whilst crowds and mortals stood below beholding the tremendous show.” When the Thames froze, the weather-show was augmented by human spectacles: archery contests, skating, games of football, acrobatics. In the late eighteenth century, when hygrometry, barometry and electro-chemical research took over, lecturers would show off their gizmos to audiences who cheered in admiration as these new Torellis reproduced clouds, lightning and tides inside glass boxes. By the nineteenth century, Philosophical Transactions carried titles such as On the late Extraordinary Depression of the Barometer and provincial correspondents gave over to London-based professionals processing readings telegraphed to them by armies of data gatherers.
A more fundamental shift than that from the anecdotal to the scientific, though, was the shift from an event-logic to an event-space logic in the thinking of weather. This, too, occurred in London—and it happened as a media event, when London’s Daily News adopted the meteorological approach pioneered by Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes, the first person to suspect that weather might be a spatial issue. In 1816 Brandes had translated weather data into graphic symbols on map bases for each day of 1783, then laid them out in series, and discovered that low pressure over Switzerland, a southeasterly storm in Italy and northwesterly winds in France were all connected, part of one and the same system. On August 31, 1846 the Daily News established Brandesian logic firmly in the public consciousness when it published the world’s first weather map. Nothing would be the same again: local weather readings became parts of a jigsaw that depicted globally evolving systems. As Janković writes, “The meaning of locality changed from its status as an exclusive end of investigation to a specimen in a larger entity, a point on a grid.”
The rest is history: we are all Brandesians now. Now rings of satellites from five networked programs—GOES-E and GOES-W (both American), EUMETSAT (European), INSAT (Indian) and GMS (Japanese)—constantly map the entire planet’s climate, sensing Earth’s atmosphere and surface at infrared wavelengths, measuring its radiance with broad, spectral-channeled radiometers and high resolution spectrometers and interferometers, inferring its parameters of temperature and water vapor. Data assimilation software generates computer models of cloud and water movement that have names like FOAM (Forecast Ocean Assimilation Model). This all takes place at the Met Office’s HQ in Bracknell, one of only two forecasting centers worldwide (the other is in Washington). There, a Cray T3E MPP (Massively Parallel Processor) computer subdivides the modeled area into a number of rectangular subdomains, each of which has a “halo” of data around its perimeter, an MPI (Message Passing Interface) allowing it to communicate with each other subdomain of the UM (Unified Model). Bracknell then relays its information to London, to Clerkenwell Road. I’ve visited the London Weather Centre. It’s beautiful. Alex Hill, the center’s chief, spent two hours immersing me in waves of data billowing from screen to networked screen: the mesocharts that generate the dramas of connectedness we see on TV forecasts every day; the tephigrams that chart atmospheric temperature and humidity vertically; the SFLOCS-images that sense and plot every single lightning bolt’s electric impulse. I can’t remember what SFLOCS stands for and I don’t care: it’s another figure in a poetry of acronyms, a vague, ambiguous and seductive series of transmissions flowing from a neo-Rilkean realm of haloed techno-angels down to us. Datum est: it is given. Data is what centers us inside the universe, its gift.
Hill took me to the London Weather Centre’s roof. He took me there to show me the Stevenson Screen, rain gauge and Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder (a crystal ball with a metal ellipse around it)—but most of all he took me there to see the view. I’ve never had such a strong sense of being in the middle of everything. You could see St. Paul’s, the Wheel, the Telecom Tower, King’s Cross, my flat. You could see Hampstead Heath. You could see all the way to the Crystal Palace and the Alexandra Palace pylons, London’s city gates. Contemporary London does have gates: the edges of its broadcast zones and weather zones. Just as London has its own TV and radio, it has its own weather. Snow on the roof of a car driving through town on a cold-but-not-arctic winter’s day designates a hick, or at least one of those semihicks, 0208-ers. The city’s buildings generate their own heat and redirect the wind, creating gale-filled corridors and doldrums within feet of one another. Peter Ackroyd describes how London’s smog was so bad in the fifties that its theatres’ audiences couldn’t see the actors. It’s Torelli all over again—but this time with the city playing the role of the creative genius. London can make rain fall upwards. It pulls off remarkable, stupendous atmospheric tricks thanks to its energy, its density, its lovely, lovely pollution. On some evenings I’ll phone or be phoned by one of two or three friends who also live high up, my fellow meta-metropolitans, and we’ll watch cloud-strips and vapor-trails alike light up and glow, hit from below by a sun drowning in haze behind the Telecom Tower. The colors are unnatural—blood-orange, purple, RGB—and constantly changing, often making us quite literally shout out in amazement, sometimes even moving us to tears.
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The dramatic atmosphere, or atmospheric drama, of contemporary London is like that of Troy: it is the drama of a city under siege. London has always thought of itself as besieged—by the Black Death, by Holland’s Fleet, by foreign speculators. And these phantoms have always ridden with the weather. Winds carried plague-spoors and bore Dutch ships towards us (“Catholic Winds,” as they were known). The great stock market crash of 1987, in which BT’s shares crashed to earth alongside the freemarket promises of 1979, coincided (as those esoteric graph-compiling economists will point out) with a hurricane. That was exceptional, though: London’s weather, generally, is what climate statisticians call “median”: middling, not extreme. The city doesn’t get tornadoes or typhoons. It does, however, face one major meteorological threat: flood. Strong tides racing up the Thames have caused disastrous inundation several times, even sweeping London Bridge away in 1090. These floods continued well into the twentieth century, but were put on hold with the completion, in 1984, of the Thames Barrier just beyond Greenwich. I grew up in Greenwich while the Barrier was being built. On our classroom walls in the late seventies were posters showing a child’s doll floating over a submerged street; from time to time slow wails would fill the air as flood sirens were tested; in the night I’d picture the doll’s eyes as I drifted into sleep to the sound of piledrivers hammering steel beams into the riverbed, a constant Morse-code pulse that spelled out “danger.” Now, less than two decades after its completion, the Thames Barrier faces imminent obsolescence due to rising global water levels and the increasing downward tilting of England’s South East. According to Alex Hill, the Hadley Center’s most extreme end prediction (modern science, like classical poetry or Puritan theology, has its own narratives of disaster: ozone depletion, global warming, acid rain) is for Cambridge to have a beach by 2050. The night after Hill told me that, I had another vision as I fell asleep: a small Dutch boy with Johnny Rotten’s face pulling his finger from a dam and smiling as he flashed his maniacal eyes, two gleaming white chrysanthemums made of ivory or marble. As Rilke said, every angel is terrifying.
London is a great city and, like all great cities, it is haunted by the specter of its ruin. An apocalyptic atmosphere broods over it, one registered in the work of the great writers who have taken London on, from Pepys to Pynchon—and nowhere more so than in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Published in 1922, the year the Met Office broadcast its first Radio forecast on the BBC, the poem is one long weather report: it rains in April, snows in winter, rains in summer too; the wind blows towards the Heimat; there is fog on London Bridge; the Thames flows out past Greenwich (where the sirens go Weilala leia); there’s a drought, but black clouds are massing over Himavant; the thunder speaks; datta. In The Waste Land, all cities become London; London becomes all cities, cracking and bursting in the violet air as their towers tumble to the ground. The poem’s privileged tense is the ongoing present: breeding, mixing, stirring, covering. This is a feature common to all weather reports. Listen out for it next time you hear the shipping forecast or watch the weather section of the news. They never use an active verb, never say “it will rain,” “winds will blow”: it’s always “becoming windier,” “clearing up,” “moving westward,” “growing brighter.” I asked Alex Hill why this was. “Simple,” he said. “You can only describe weather as being in transition from a point A to a point B. In transition between—never at.” In dramatic terms, it’s called in medias res: in the middle of things.
Since 2001, as the global climate heats up in more ways than one, London, caught at the confluence of systems moving over from the States and from the Middle East, finds itself even more in medias res. When storm-clouds groan and rumble, people scour the sky for airplanes flying too low. I track them from my windows, waiting for the day when one of them will hurtle like a meteor into the Telecom Tower, painting the sky a new blood-orange. If it happens it will be spectacular. Until then, we’ll continue talking about the weather.
2002