All the fun of the fairs
TAKE IN THE 17THCENTURY SPECTACLE, AS BUILT UPON A FROZEN THAMES
Carol Ann Duffy’s new poem
‘Frost Fair’ transports us back to London in 1683 and the winter of The Great Frost. From 20 December to 6 February the following year, the Thames froze over and led to a unique spectacle of a Frost Fair, a kind of festival-meetsmarket. Duffy’s character wanders through this “another town on the Thames” and experiences many of the activities that took place at the time, from the rows of booths selling everything from black pudding to gingerbread to the nine-pin bowling, jugglers and fire-eaters, as captured in the accompanying illustrations by David De Las Heras.
The writer John Evelyn captured the scenes of this 17th-century spectacle: “Coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from several other staires to and fro, as in the streetes, sliding with skeetes, a bull-baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, cookes, tipling and other lewd places, so that it seemed a bacchanalian triumph or carnival on the water.”
A unique set of circumstances helped the Thames freeze, not just the temperature, with ice measuring up to 28cm deep. The river was wider and slower flowing then, while the way the old
London Bridge was built encouraged the build-up of ice. It wasn’t just the river that froze in 1683, however: it was also the waters around the southern part of the North Sea. That meant sailors in search of an income took part in some quick improvisation: they repurposed their boats as sledges to give rides. They were far from being the only quick-thinking entrepreneurs out on the ice. One pamphlet described how getting a shave out in the
middle of the frozen water was “an experience to be remembered in the afterlife!” There were ways to remember the occasion in this life, too: Duffy’s heroine pays a sixpence to get a printed souvenir of the event with your name upon it. King Charles II did exactly the same – and it still survives today. For the rest of us, perhaps the easiest way to evoke the moment is to savour the sights, sounds and smells through the words of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem.