River Thames Frost Fairs

If you're interested in this time, Julia Fullerton-Batten did some amazing fine-art photography around the theme of "Old Father Thames" and the 1814 Frost Fair [1].

[1] https://www.juliafullerton-batten.com/projectmenu.php?catNo=...

It has been reported that Scotland's mountains had glaciers up to about 1700:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-258...

Edit: I spend a lot of time the Scottish mountains and I'm fascinated by glaciation so deeply disappointed that I missed them by such a relatively short period of time.

It is interesting to me how far apart in time some of these were. It must have been quite an experience for it to stay in the minds of revelers for so many years between them.

Or perhaps it it one of those things where it dropped out of though for sometimes decades at a time, but the Thames was such a large presence in their lives that when it froze over stories from parents/grandparents came flooding back and they wanted to recreate and have their memory of standing in the middle of it?

The Doctor visited one such frost fair with his companion Bill.

Oh neat! One of these takes place in Virginia Woolf's book Orlando and I wasn't sure which parts were historical and which were fanciful.

While I was aware these were largely a relic of the Little Ice Age, I hadn’t realised how rare they were even then. Nor had I appreciated the confluence of factors that created them, including the narrow arches of the previous London Bridge.

There is something similar in modern times in Hamburg called "Alstereisvergnügen". Alster is the river, Eis is ice, and Vergnügen can be translated as Fair.