Killer Storms and Cruel Winters - The History of Extreme Weather Timeshift

For all its drama and power,

the impact of our recent extreme weather

is NOTHING compared to history.

Though 2014 was the wettest winter ever recorded,

with floods of biblical magnitude,

the human costs are not even on the same scale as in the past.

In the 17th century,

a devastating flood on the Somerset Levels

killed over 1,000 people.

And historical records show Britain has had storms

that decimated whole regions in a single day.

In the Great Storm of 1703,

our Navy came close to collapse

when 8,000 sailors perished.

There's been plenty of extreme weather,

but which is the worst we've ever had?

What makes a storm the worst?

Should it be judged by the wind speed?

Or perhaps its duration?

Or maybe even because of the destruction it caused?

And if its destruction, is that measured by how widespread it was?

Perhaps the cost of the destruction,

or maybe even because of the number of lives that were claimed?

In our modern world, death tolls are a fraction of those of history.

But does that mean that our storms are somehow less momentous?

Or is it just that roughly the same meteorological events

can produce very different outcomes on the ground?

I'm Dr Lucie Green.

I spent my career as a solar scientist

studying the sun's effect on us.

My work builds on a wealth of knowledge

created by centuries of weather science.

Mostly, these breakthroughs in our understanding

have been driven by the need to combat the extremes of weather

Britain is subject to,

perched out on the exposed edge of the Atlantic.

We haven't just been battered by brutal weather,

we have bettered it by learning to adapt to its challenges.

Modern Britain was forged by the extremes of its weather.

One biting winter so cruelly exposed our national reliance on coal

that Plan B accelerated in the nuclear age.

When the Thames froze over in 1814,

civil engineers were able to prevent a reoccurrence

with a new generation of sleeker bridges

that improved the river's flow.

And pioneering meteorologists took to the skies

to make the long-held dream of forecasting the weather a reality.

Risking death from asphyxiation,

some flew higher than Everest to find the sky's secrets.

Join me on a journey through some of the most terrifying weather

to ever hit our shores, and find out

how these extreme events tested us British to our limits.

On the 30th January, 1607, at roughly 9:00 in the morning,

a wall of water, moving faster than a greyhound can run,

hammered up the Bristol Channel

and overran the rudimentary sea defences here in North Somerset.

It wiped out entire villages, and formed an inland sea

that was over three feet deep

and stretched for over 200 square miles.

The waters raced in from the Bristol Channel,

over there on the horizon, and came all the way up to Glastonbury Tor.

The extent of the flooding, and the devastation it caused,

meant that as many as 1,000 people died.

And these were poor people from rural communities -

men, women and children who worked on the land.

And where I'm standing now became an island.

The water breached both sides of the Bristol Channel,

flooding communities in South Wales and North Somerset.

Striking in the morning, the floods hit

at a time when everyone had left their homes

and were outside working.

The scale of the destruction was catastrophic.

Whole villages were obliterated.

And in this time before the scientific age,

the terrified survivors looked to God for answers.

This is All Saints' Church in Kingston Seymour.

And even though we're roughly one mile from the coast here,

the floodwaters came about five feet up the side of the building.

It must have been shocking to see,

and it prompted a moment of deep religious reflection,

with a widespread conclusion that the waters were the result

of God's punishment

for the sins of the nation.

This disaster sparked a host of written pamphlets

that declared the floods a divine "warning".

In Britain's overwhelmingly agricultural society,

with everyone working in the fields,

our ancestors were especially vulnerable to extreme weather.

When the heavens opened, there was little they could do

other than look to the same heavens for salvation.

Today, the "hand of God" has been replaced by the insights of science.

So, what do you think happened on that fateful day?

We know that at 9 o'clock in the morning, it was high tide.

And it was one of the biggest tides of the year.

And we know it was really windy on that morning.

We know it was a fearful storm with strong westerly winds,

and on top of that, there was a storm surge.

And a storm surge is what the weather does to the sea surface.

The low pressure and the strong winds can cause the sea to rise

by 2 to 3m around the British coastline.

And that's a storm surge, and it's an addition of sea water

over hundreds of square kilometres,

which on top of that already big tide,

would have just rushed over the top of any sea wall

and there'd have been nothing to stop that volume of water.

Now, there is a competing theory, isn't there,

that it was possibly caused by a tsunami rather than a storm surge?

What do you think about that?

It has been suggested, but there's really no need to suggest that.

We know that the tide was the highest tide in a century.

We're almost certain from the historical records that it was windy.

That's what all of the parish registers

and all of the chronicles of the time say.

And the other thing to take into consideration is that

12 hours later on the east of the country, in East Anglia,

they had flooding there as well.

So the same weather system then wreaked havoc

on the other side of the country.

Whatever the cause, the impact of the flood was devastating.

For the peasants farming the fields,

there was nowhere to escape as the waters raced in.

In the 17th century, few people could swim and there was no warning.

The extreme death toll resulted from the farming methods of the era

as much as the weather itself.

In 1607, the floods took victims

because they were working in the fields.

Today, those jobs have been replaced by machinery.

So if an identical flood were to happen now,

would it still be viewed as an extreme event?

In death toll, certainly not,

but the devastation was so severe,

such events spurred learned men to look beyond the divine for answers.

Enlightenment science began the centuries-long quest

for the answers to Britain's extreme weather.

They started collecting data,

and the 17th century saw a new concept -

the weather diary.

When I was a young girl, I kept a weather diary,

and this is one of them.

Every single day, I would make a note

of whether it was sunny and warm

or cold and windy or wet,

and also how the weather affected my daily life.

These were perhaps the first steps of the scientist coming out in me.

But little did I realise at the time, that I was following

in the footsteps of a 300-year-old tradition.

One of the early diaries was kept by a man

known by some as the father of meteorology.

He was first curator of experiments at the Royal Society,

and his archives are held here today.

But he's also something of a forgotten genius.

There are no known images of him,

even through he laid the foundations for weather forecasting.

That pioneer was Robert Hooke,

and he turned the art of chronicling the weather

into a scientific endeavour.

This guide was written by Robert Hooke

and in the text, he lays out a methodology

to turn the record of weather

into something that's scientifically useful.

For the first time, a set of instructions were created

to tell people how to monitor wind, temperature and air pressure.

It's a far cry from the more descriptive journals

that I kept as a child, and it meant that weather turned from something

that was merely opinion into something that was

scientifically useful information.

Robert Hooke's far-sighted idea

was for a network of scientific observers across the kingdom

to make weather deducible,

an early vision of a Met Office.

Hooke died in March 1703,

just months before one of Britain's extreme weather events.

Documenting this would fall to a more famous writer.

Once he could get out of jail, that is.

November 1703, and a "friendless and distress'd" man

is released from Newgate Prison,

which stood on that site just behind me, now the Old Bailey.

The man described himself as

"ruined" and "without hope of deliverance".

Yet an event was about to happen

that would both devastate the country,

but also change this man's fortunes.

His name? Daniel Defoe,

and he was about to chronicle the greatest storm in Britain's history.

It swept in from the Atlantic, pounding Britain with

hurricane-force winds of up to 100mph.

The storm path stretched from Birmingham to the south coast,

and ripped up the country as it moved east.

Roofs tore off.

Houses blew apart.

By the time the maelstrom subsided, over 8,000 Britons were dead.

Daniel Defoe was staggered by the ferocity, the damage and the impact.

Surely such a mighty storm should be remembered?

He placed adverts in two newspapers

and solicited accounts from across the country

to "preserve the Remembrance of the late dreadful tempest".

His call reached across the country

to mayors, harbour masters and clergymen.

Eyewitnesses recorded like never before,

their testimonies brought to life by modern-day counterparts.

"On one side whereof runneth the river Severn,

"which by reason of the violence of the late storm

"beat down and tore to pieces the sea wall in many places,

"and levelled it almost with the ground,

"forcing vast quantities of earth a great distance from the shore,

"and stones, many of which were above a hundredweight."

"In the midst of this churchyard grew a vast tree,

"thought to be the most large and flourishing elm in the land,

"which was torn up by the roots,

"some of which are really bigger than one's middle,

"and several than a man's thigh."

"Damages about our church testify

"how strong and boisterous the winds were,

"for they unbedded three sheets of lead upon the uppermost roof,

"and rolled them up like so much paper."

Daniel Defoe compiled these reports into a unique book, The Storm.

And this is it, the product of Daniel Defoe's diligent efforts.

It's astonishing to be holding it.

This is the definitive account of an extreme weather event

from over 300 years ago,

and each page carries its own personal and touching story.

And it even smells like a musty old room.

One account is from Brighton, where I used to live,

or Brighthelmston, as it was known then, and it reads:

"Brighthelmston being an old built and poor,

"though' populous town,

"was most miserably torn to pieces

"and made the very Picture of Desolation,

"that it look't as if an Enemy had sack't it."

This reads more like a war journal than a story about weather.

If the storm was harsh on land, it was horrific at sea.

Seeking refuge, 700 merchant ships were smashed together in the Thames.

Around the coast, a fifth of all sailors in Britain's Navy

were drowned, and over 100 ships wrecked.

At the time, British sea power was fuelling dreams of a global empire.

The storm came close to halting this.

It was the first weather event to be a news story on a national scale.

Much of this was down to Defoe's reportage,

but he also strived to make the eyewitness accounts he gathered

as scientifically valid as they were dramatic.

He didn't just advance journalism, but weather science too.

This would be a continuing theme

in Britain's encounters with extreme weather.

We learned from them, and began to see

how to control the weather's worst impacts.

Up to the 18th and into the 19th century

was a period where, in some years,

average winter temperatures were as much as

two degrees lower than today.

It has become known as the Little Ice Age.

This meant bleak winters, food and fuel shortages -

in short, much suffering and hunger.

The raw cold gave birth to London's very own glacier

as the Thames froze over.

London, the world's richest port, blocked solid.

An economic disaster.

Ship owners fretted, but the rest of London partied,

at frost fairs on the ice.

With the authorities desperate to get the Thames moving,

merchants and buskers plied their trade on London's gateway.

Every kind of food was for sale on that impromptu street -

there was coffee, absinthe, winter ale,

even one account of a sheep being roasted.

They sold it for a shilling a slice

and rather ingeniously marketed it as "Lapland mutton".

The raucous feasting was washed down with home brew.

Some of the stalls sold "purl", a brew of gin and wormwood wine.

But due to its ruinous effects,

these stalls became known as "fuddling tents".

And for their visitors,

they must have had a perilous journey home across the ice.

Rowdy crowds, ice and potent booze - a health and safety nightmare.

'I asked an expert on the frost fairs, Georgina Young,

'just how dangerous it could be.'

Well, they could be quite hazardous. The prints we have of the frost fairs

show people falling through the ice, they show people slipping over.

And slips and trips

could be quite serious at that time.

If you broke a bone in 1814, that was no minor thing.

How many accidents were there?

Well, the records aren't all that clear.

But we certainly know that on several occasions at frost fairs,

people did fall through the ice and die,

and there are accounts of people having been unable to be rescued,

having fallen through. But I think the number of incidents

of slipping and tripping must have been enormous.

The frost fair left a legacy of some bizarre mementos,

which the museum has preserved.

-What's this?

-This, as far as we know,

is the only surviving piece of gingerbread from the 1814 frost fair.

So gingerbread was quite commonly sold on the ice.

Spicy foods go down well in a cold climate.

So gingerbread was sold. It was obviously sold to be eaten,

but this has a lovely story, in that the family retained it.

So the person who bought this actually hung onto it,

and passed it on to their daughter, who then passed it to the museum.

So they kind of kept something that was supposed to be eaten

on the ice and just held on to it

until it became so special as a memento

that they thought it's worthy of museum preservation.

And how about this one?

This was also "printed on the Thames" as well, is it?

This is really amazing.

It's printed on the very last day of the very last frost fair.

And it's a comic message from A Thaw to J Frost -

or Jack Frost - telling him to quit the Thames.

It's a indication that the ice is starting to melt

and the days of the frost fair are numbered.

So, a sort of tongue-in-cheek message for people to

-get back on the safety of dry land?

-Absolutely, it's one of

the last things that would have been

printed on the ice before everyone packed up and got off.

LUCIE LAUGHS

It's 200 years since anyone bought souvenirs at a frost fair.

That's partly because our winters are slightly milder,

but it's also because of the actions of 19th-century engineers

striving to improve navigation on the Thames.

To do this they removed one ancient river hazard -

the chaotic Old London Bridge.

This picture shows Old London Bridge with

the frost fair in the foreground.

The view is the same as the one behind me.

You can see that the old bridge was supported

by this series of very narrow arches.

Quite different to the bridge today.

And that's key - these narrow arches hampered the flow of the river

and trapped pieces of floating ice, essentially forming an ice dam,

whereas today the fast-flowing river moving through the broad arches

freezes over much less easily.

The Old London Bridge also acted like a weir, preventing

the salty, tidal Thames mixing with upstream fresh water.

All the newer incarnations of the bridge

allow brackish water further upstream.

Just as salt is used to prevent icy roads,

salt water acts as an antifreeze here.

And the river itself has changed dramatically.

In 1870, embankments were built,

halving its width and speeding its flow.

The Thames once lapped the river gardens of the Strand.

In fact, strand means "shore" in Old English.

Now the river is over 100m away.

The water gates of Somerset House once welcomed Admiralty yachts,

but now just greet delivery trucks.

So yes, the winters were on average colder back then.

But the Thames froze because it was quite a different river.

The Victorians had shown they had the power to change

the impact of severe weather.

And soon, solitary weather watchers were being

organised into a countrywide network of observers.

But Victorian meteorologists were caught by surprise

when Britain's coldest ever temperature was recorded in 1895.

I'm travelling into the Cairngorm Mountains to visit

the site of this record-breaking low

and to find the reasons behind this extreme - in the village of Braemar.

Welcome to Ice Station Braemar.

The inside of this curious little hut holds the record for

the official coldest place in Britain not once but twice over.

In 1895 and again in 1982,

a mind-numbing temperature of minus 27.2 Celsius

was recorded in this building.

That's ten degrees lower than your freezer.

It may have lost its grandeur,

but this is a royal palace to weather data.

The station was a gift from Queen Victoria's husband

Prince Albert back in 1855.

Robert Hooke's 17th-century dream of predicting the weather

through diligent measurements was realised in the Victorian Age.

From the heart of the village, it is hard to see why

Braemar gets such extremes.

It becomes clearer as you head into the surrounding heights.

For most of the UK, in the coastal regions, the sea regulates

our temperature. Scorching summer heats are cooled by sea breezes,

whilst in the winter, the warmth of the ocean heats the air around us.

But Braemar is right in the heart of Scotland.

It's over 50 miles to the sea in every direction.

There's nothing here to stop those extreme temperatures.

These mountains are stunning, but they are also a mammoth parasol.

In midwinter, the sun is so low in the sky

it barely makes it above the peaks surrounding Braemar,

and the village gets less than 3½ hours of sunshine a day.

From this viewpoint, you can see that Braemar

is nestled in the bottom of this valley,

and that turns it into something that is known as a frost hollow.

During the night, cold, dense air sinks down onto the town

and the temperature plummets.

So if you put all these things together, you can see why

the town's weather station has the record

for coldest temperature in Britain.

Braemar's weather centre was just a tiny part of

a growing network of weather stations.

Since its birth in 1854, the Met Office had begun cataloguing

every nuance of Britain's meteorology.

Archived data meant weather patterns could be detected,

giving advance warning of extremes.

And not just for bitter winters.

During one searing heat wave in 1858, the Thames

turned into a concentrated, fermenting mass of sewage.

Parliament considered relocating as temperatures hit

record highs of over 32 degrees and the smell became hard to bear.

Surely better science could prevent this?

Ambitions were high.

Victorian researchers had tamed the chemical elements,

making reactions predictable.

Were the skies also a giant laboratory

to be understood and controlled?

Scientists might then become rainmakers and defeat drought.

To gain knowledge, some meteorologists

would put themselves in peril.

James Glaisher was more weather boffin than Victorian adventurer.

Yet, in the daring spirit of the age,

he realised the best way to study the sky was to be up in it.

In 1862, Glaisher raised funds for the Mammoth -

then the largest balloon ever built.

Once full of hydrogen, the balloon was cast off.

The only way down again was to pull a release valve.

They had a pilot - Henry Coxwell -

but finding a scientist proved fruitless.

Eventually, the 53-year-old Glaisher agreed.

Unbeknown to him, he was about to risk his life for meteorology.

Could the Mammoth help him

discover the mysteries of the atmosphere?

To do this, Glaisher took with him more than 20 instruments.

One was to prove important - the wet/dry thermometer.

As liquid water becomes vapour, it chills its surroundings.

That's why humans sweat to cool down.

By measuring the strength of this cooling,

you can estimate how dry the air must be.

The drier the air, the lower its humidity.

The key to the experiments is this. It's a hygrometer.

It contains two thermometers - a wet thermometer and a dry thermometer.

On the wet one, the water evaporates and it lowers

the temperature reading.

Whereas the dry one just gives us the temperature

of the ambient air around it.

The difference in temperature on these two thermometers

can be used to tell the humidity of the air around us.

So on the wet thermometer I have a reading of eight degrees,

and on the dry I have 14 degrees, and I can use those numbers,

look them up on my chart... and I see that I get

a relative humidity of about 24%.

And that's at a height of 500ft above ground level.

This is exactly the type of instrument that Glaisher

would have used on his early, pioneering balloon flights.

Rising higher and higher,

Glaisher found humidity dropped, with air getting ever drier.

He also observed that the atmosphere was like a swirling sea,

with different currents moving at different speeds.

Glaisher had taken an early step in understanding

high-altitude conditions.

Today, we know such currents - like the jet stream -

are key drivers of Britain's weather systems.

My balloon barely reached 2,000ft.

The courageous Glaisher went much, much higher.

By now, the duo had soared to the height of Everest.

With the higher altitude, oxygen levels dropped,

and Glaisher was soon struggling to breathe.

Glaisher's sight started to fail, he lost control of his limbs

and then he blacked out. But still, the balloon rose.

The pilot, Coxwell, could not release the balloon's gas.

As it rose, the balloon had spun wildly,

wrapping the gas release cord into the rigging

and out of the men's reach.

With no way down, the balloon soared higher and higher.

Death looked inevitable.

The balloon was seven miles up - higher than a jumbo jet.

Glaisher was unconscious.

Now it was left to Coxwell alone to bring them down.

He climbed into the rigging to try and seize the release valve,

but his frostbitten hands were losing feeling.

Instead, he was forced to pull the release valve with his teeth.

It worked.

Finally, the balloon began to descend.

For a full seven minutes, James Glaisher was out cold.

Finally, Glaisher awoke. "I have been insensible," he said.

And then got straight back to making his measurements.

Glaisher's readings suggest he had reached

a world-record-setting 37,000ft,

higher than any human before.

He had helped our understanding of the atmosphere,

but the dream of switching off drought remained elusive.

EPIC, STIRRING MUSIC

Meanwhile, The Met Office's influence was growing.

By harnessing greater scientific understanding of the processes

that drive weather, the accuracy of its forecasts was improving.

At the start of the 20th century, radio technology began to help

supply data more swiftly to forecasters.

Yet extremes were still often surprises.

London flooded in 1928 and drought struck between 1932 and '34.

But these were nothing compared to weather

so extreme it brought the country close to collapse.

In 1947, Britain was limping from a global conflict.

Its infrastructure was crippled and the economy near bankruptcy.

A vicious winter was the last thing the nation needed.

It came from nowhere.

On the 17th of January, 1947, it was a balmy 14 degrees Celsius.

But the temperature soon dropped.

The first frost came in on January the 20th,

and it was followed three days later by snow.

Snow fell somewhere in Britain every single day for almost eight weeks.

It was the heaviest snowfall that the country had experienced

since records began.

The snow ground everything to a halt.

The rail network, on which the country still depended,

blocked up with 15ft drifts.

Coal still fuelled Britain then, but the mines were struggling.

75,000 extra miners were needed to meet demand

and there was no cash to buy imported coal.

The Minister of Fuel and Power, Manny Shinwell,

had faith that the new spirit

of his recently nationalised coal industry would increase its yield.

But he had gambled on a warm winter.

Coal stocks, which were already low after the Second World War,

were at breaking point even before the winter weather set in.

Now they reached crisis levels.

The total reliance on coal for heating, for the rail network,

for power stations and for industry left Britain vulnerable.

The place just shut down! Two million workers were sent home.

But home brought few comforts.

I think this is awful. No coal,

no toast, no bread, no fat, no bacon, no eggs...

People queued for hours to collect coal.

They tried to keep smiling through

as they waited for their meagre ration.

The victors of World War II struggled in houses with little coal

to heat them or power to light them.

Government opponents talked of "shivering with Shinwell".

There are many moving stories.

At one Manchester depot, a man demanded extra coal at gunpoint.

When the gunman came before magistrates,

it was clear where their sympathies lay.

He was fined £1 and had his revolver confiscated.

In desperation, people burned anything they could get hold of -

railway sleepers, coal dust mixed with cement -

some even burning shoes.

The country was dying of cold.

In the first three months of 1947,

over 25,000 more people died than the previous year.

How many for lack of warmth?

This harsh lesson taught us not to rely solely on coal for electricity.

As the winter warmed,

plans for nuclear power stations were raced through.

Reliable electricity from uranium is 1947's legacy.

No Briton would be forced to burn their shoes again.

Just a few years later in 1955,

Scotland suffered another brutal winter.

Blizzards swept in and cut off isolated regions.

Yet, this time, the nation was ready.

The Government launched Operation Snowdrop.

NEWSREEL: 'The pilot and crew look down upon a white wilderness

'searching for letters spelt out in the snow.'

The stricken highlanders were told to write out signals in the show.

F for food, D for doctor and C for cattle fodder.

30 helicopters and many planes dropped fresh bread,

tins and even cigarettes.

Flight after flight took off from HMS Glory.

Operation Snowdrop shows that our memory of extreme weather

can change depending on our preparation.

But sometimes there's no time to ready yourself for the worst.

This is Lynmouth on the edge of Exmoor.

It's incredibly calm and tranquil today,

but on the evening of August 15th, 1952, it was the scene of what

one witness called "destruction worse than the heaviest Blitz.

"It stuns the human mind," they said.

On that evening, from out of nowhere, a wall of water came

crashing down this street carrying with it

over 100,000 tonnes of debris.

Huge boulders ripped up the road,

over 20 bridges were obliterated,

almost 100 buildings destroyed,

but worst of all, 34 people lost their lives.

Lynmouth - a picture postcard town -

was at the height of the holiday season.

Many of the tourists were staying close to the river.

While Britain slept, Lynmouth was savaged.

Dawn revealed the carnage.

I am now standing on the front steps of my hotel.

What you see in front of you, this raging torrent,

was originally the main road from Minehead through Lynmouth to Lynton.

About half-past nine there was a tremendous roar.

The West Lyn had broken its banks and dashed against the side of

the hotel, bringing with it

thousands of tonnes of rocks and debris.

At about 2am the rear portion of the hotel collapsed

with a tremendous roar.

But luckily, the main building stood and we survived the night.

The flash flood started far from Lynmouth,

high on the hills of Exmoor.

It began when 9 inches - or 23cm -

of rain fell in 24 hours.

Three months' rain in a single day.

Hitting ground already saturated, the rain simply raced into streams.

These streams united in rivers growing ever stronger.

And this is where two of the rivers meet.

The East Lyn and Hoaroak Water, each carrying

a substantial amount of floodwater collected from across a vast area.

At this confluence point, a vast wall of water grew,

as it was funnelled by the steep valley sides.

And it was headed straight for Lynmouth.

WATER ROARS

But this was no steady torrent.

The flow came in bursts.

The bridges trapped trees and boulders,

creating a temporary dam which then breached,

creating a 12m high wave that swept through here.

All the water running off 40 square miles of moorland

funnels into Lynmouth. Yet this did not stop Victorian builders

thinking they could control it.

The course of the river had been diverted years before.

And as this popular tourist destination developed,

new houses were built on the old river channel.

But nothing was going to stop this deluge.

As it came crashing through

it smashed the houses to pieces,

carrying everything out to sea - including the people.

The victims were of every age - babies, teenagers and the elderly.

Perhaps most tragic of all,

a woman's body was found which was never identified.

She remains unknown.

Lynmouth had flooded before, but never to this magnitude.

Had something changed in the landscape

to multiply the effect of the rain?

To make Exmoor more profitable, Victorians had drained

the mossy bogs by digging ditches.

These bogs - which once acted as sponges -

now became pasture for grazing sheep.

Rain on the moors had little to stop it

flowing straight into rivers, exacerbating floods.

Today, over £2 million is being spent to fill in the ditches

and restore the peat bogs.

Early tests show this should

cut the water entering rivers by a third.

About a quarter of Britain was once wetland yet, as our bond with

the land has altered, we have forgotten this.

In some senses it feels like we've come full circle.

And perhaps because we've had a rather short-sighted view

on the use of this land, human intervention

that ultimately improved the yield for farming

actually ends up putting Lynmouth at risk of flooding.

But now we are looking back to nature to control the flow of water.

Around the country,

such actions upstream can help reduce the flow of water downstream.

Throughout Britain's history, changing our landscape

has transformed the impact of weather.

There are few clearer examples than where we reclaim land from nature.

Canvey Island on the Essex coast was one such man-made place.

We are not the owners of the land, but nature's temporary tenants.

NEWSREEL MUSIC

Post war, houses sprung up as families started new lives

away from ruined London.

Simple, one-storey, prefabricated houses.

But they'd built on borrowed land. Nature was ready to take it back.

On the night of 31st January, 1953, a terrifying storm was

smashing its way down Britain's east coast.

A belt of extreme low pressure was drawing the sea upwards

by over 5m - almost two storeys high.

And despite striking all along the coast, no warning was issued.

The first most people on Canvey Island

knew of the surge of water was when it hit their homes.

Canvey Island was about to fall victim to the fatal trio

that create a storm surge.

First, the air pressure that normally pushes down

on the surface of the sea reduced,

creating a bulge in the water,

and that was on top of an already high tide,

then gale force winds brought that bulge towards the shore.

And here at Tewkes Creek is where

that mass of water burst through the flood defences.

Families were evacuated across the island.

Here, Elizabeth Howard and her children escape by boat.

Her son Ray, who was then just 11,

explained how the floodwaters struck.

My sister came into our room

to say, "There's water

"gushing down the street", and the street we are covering now,

it was just...looked out the window and you could see it gushing down.

'He took me to his family home.'

How does it feel to see it again?

Yes, it brings back memories,

considerably.

I mean, it was 62 years ago, so that's a very long time ago,

but it still is in my mind and always will be.

I've got an aerial shot of Canvey and the floods.

-Which one of these is yours?

-This one here at the end.

So you can see the extend of the flooding.

This whole area is covered.

Absolutely.

Canvey has an acreage of 4,500,

so it's a small island,

but you can see how much flooding took place,

particularly in certain sections of Canvey,

and they didn't have lots of money in those days.

They'd go and buy a plot of land for next to nothing

and build a little shack.

Those who could afford two-storey homes had somewhere to escape.

But poor families living in flimsy, prefab, single-storey homes

were engulfed by the waters.

Of the 300 people killed by the storm, 59 were in Canvey.

Ray Howard would only discover who when he returned to school.

It was a very sad occasion

to hear the different stories

of what had happened to other parts of the island and families.

Some lost their mums or dads, or their brothers or sisters,

or all their relatives.

Boys and girls in certain classes didn't return.

A simple warning could've saved many such lives.

Today, Canvey Islanders are not only protected by this flood

defence wall, they, like much of Britain,

have a storm surge warning service, too.

When surges are forecast, the population evacuates.

Whilst we cannot switch off such weather,

we've learned to make floods less deadly.

Today, the houses of Canvey Island shelter behind this

rather impressive wall of concrete and steel,

a brutal solution to protecting themselves

from the potentially destructive force of the sea,

but with water levels constantly rising,

how long will this approach last?

Britain's most extreme weather events have chiefly involved

excess water in many forms - rain, snow or the sea.

But, at times, water is the one thing we crave.

One extreme weather episode is burnt into our national psyche -

the benchmark by which all summers are judged - scorching 1976.

MUSIC: "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate

In one 15-day blast,

the temperature reached 32 Celsius degrees every day.

As the nation basked in the heat,

they were deaf to Met Office alarm bells.

Well, I think it's likely to stay pretty hot

over the next few days. We're getting close to records now,

so it's difficult to forecast an actual record,

but I think pretty hot, staying up close to 90.

Rainfall had been drying up since the previous autumn.

The next 16 months were the driest since the reign of George II.

As reservoirs emptied, it gradually hit home -

could we actually run out of water?

Crops shrivelled.

-NEWSREEL:

-'The intense heat

'and lack of rain has had a disastrous effect on cereals,

'from the Wash down to the Severn.'

Fires burning with no water to extinguish them were no joke.

NEWSREEL: 'The Fire Service has also been hard-pressed in other areas.

'Thousands of tonnes of sewage

'have been used on one fire to help conserve dwindling water supplies.'

Roasting sewage wasn't the only thing causing a big stink.

Water wars became class wars.

-NEWSREEL:

-'In the middle of dried-up, drought-ridden,

'water-tortured London,

'welcome to an oasis. Its name? Hampstead Golf Club.

'On the day that the Prime Minister has called a cabinet meeting

'about the water crisis,'

and as people in some parts of the country have no water at all,

the ladies and gentlemen of Hampstead Golf Club

can safely have a round or two in the knowledge that their greens,

at least, are beautifully soft and moist.

Such cavalier attitudes wilted.

Water meters and protocols to enforce restrictions were to

be the legacy of an era when the nation's tank almost ran dry.

Though 1976 broke records for lack of rain, Britain's highest

temperatures were reached more recently, in the summer of 2003.

I'm on my way to visit the hottest place on our island.

-NEWSREEL:

-'An exceptional summer gets even hotter - hotter, in fact,

'than has ever been recorded before.

'This was the south coast today.'

Heathrow Airport was the first to break records,

reaching 37.9 degree Celsius.

Through the day, other weather stations

relayed their data to the Met Office.

Heathrow's record was soon topped.

Gravesend in Kent earned a place in the record books today,

topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 38.1 Celsius.

10th August 2003 -

the date of a battle over extreme weather supremacy.

It was the hottest day on record - no-one contested that -

but what was argued over is exactly where that maximum was reached.

The crown first went to Gravesend with 38.1 degrees Celsius.

But then the results came in from this volunteer weather station,

who recorded 38.5.

But could they take the crown?

Met Office officials came and checked the equipment,

and even though it's still argued over today,

it is this farm in Brogdale that holds that extreme weather record.

Landscape once again had helped shape our weather.

This beautiful Kent farm reached this weather extreme

because it lies close to an "urban heat island" - London.

The concrete jungle absorbs more heat than vegetation does -

not least the tall buildings with multiple sunlit surfaces.

This hot air drifted to Brogdale, helping to warm it to record highs.

Across Europe, the heat wave of August 2003 caused the biggest fall

in agricultural output for 100 years, and over 30,000 deaths,

many of them old people.

As a result, we've learned to educate those at risk

to rehydrate as the temperature rises,

and we've created community cooling centres for the most vulnerable.

It is very likely, according to Oxford University scientists,

that human influence had more than doubled the probability

of such extreme temperatures.

Future fears about global warming

tend to focus on the potential for severe heat waves.

Yet, as a maritime nation, it's the impact on our seas

and estuaries that I find most worrying.

Some of our greatest extremes - the floods in 1607

and the storm surge of 1953 - came from the sea.

But, across our history of extreme weather,

we have one real success story -

the Thames Barrier.

If a storm surge is forecast,

giant walls are lifted to block it reaching the city.

Repeatedly, London has been protected by this technology.

But has it made London think the threat has subsided?

In November 2007, weather forecasters predicted a storm surge

that would be a once-in-50-year event.

So, would the happenings of 1953 be repeated?

Well, this time it was a completely different story -

warnings were issued and the public were alerted.

The sea defences held...

just - the water lapped to within 10cm of their tops,

and this barrier here prevented the surge flooding London.

Human ingenuity had beaten nature.

Luckily, the storm passed and didn't end in tragedy,

but, ironically, it means that this event has all but been forgotten.

The human memory is a poor weather archive.

Our successes are forgotten and disasters remembered.

Weather's impact will always be wedded to human actions,

for good and for ill.

When the 1607 floods struck the area near this hill,

the people felt powerless to prevent it.

The difference with modern-day storm surges is that we can look to

science for protection, warning and rescue.

Today, we have improved our ability to keep the water out,

and we can have advanced warning of what is coming.

Yet that is changing.

We live in a warming world with rising sea levels.

I've never met a climate scientist who would disagree with that.

Without knowing the climate ahead,

predicting the weather extremes of the future

is still beyond our current ability.

One message has been clear to me throughout my journey -

we ignore nature at our peril.

We reclaim land from the sea and then build insufficient defences,

but yet are surprised when we suffer

the tragedy of peoples' homes being drowned.

We don't increase the fuel stocks, and then people die

when the coal runs out.

In 1975, we wasted water,

yet we were surprised by a drought the following year.

Time and time again,

human folly amplifies the impact of nature on our lives.

So, what does nature have in store for us next?

One thing is for sure - the future will be no less harsh than the past.

The only question is - are we up to the challenge?