There is a lot of snow today in London. It has been snowing since yesterday evening and it still is. The city is not really used to it or prepared for it, so it means the daily routine is disrupted or hasn’t even started.
The BBC writes, “Heavy snowfall has left roads closed, and public transport running a skeletal service or nothing at all.”
Image from BBC London
This means not many options to travel around. Probably a lot of people cannot even get to work if they tried and Schools are closed all day.
London has seen the heaviest snowfall in 18 years, weather experts said, according to BBC. It is around 10 cm of snow until now, but could be more towards the evening. Last time, something like this happened, in January 2003, there was what was called the heaviest snowfall in 10 years with about one inch (2cm) of snow.
Image by urbanTick – a lot of snow in London!
The normal everyday rhythm has been completely changed by the weather. There is no 09h-00 to 17h00 working hours today, no scheduled transport, even the airports have closed their busy runways. The city beats differently under the snow.
Businesses have already calculated loss of £1bn because of the disrupted routines. The market reacts quickly to changing conditions. According to BBC Shares in British Airways, which has cancelled all flights from Heathrow, were down 4.25% at 115 pence, while Go-Ahead, which runs Southeastern rail services, was down 2% at 963.5p. These only because it is a day not going according to plan, but when does it go according to plan?
Finally, at around 15h00 UCL has decided to send out an email to all staff and student with instructions on how to deal with these exceptional circumstances. Trying to introduce some sort of rhythm they wrote the following line “All attempts are being made to keep UCL running but it is necessary for reasons of safety and security and on account of unavoidable short staffing to switch to the Friday shut-down routine for all buildings. Procedures in place for week-end working therefore apply…”
If it is not the Monday rhythm there will be an other one to apply.
A not quite accurate but idealistic impression of today in London
tlSnowStreet from urbanTick on Vimeo.
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