3-071-081 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Great Storm of Wind on Friday week: fallen gable at Shoreditch Goods Station, 1881. 'A storm of Wind, seldom equalled in violence and long continuance, passed over the British Islands on Friday week, beginning on the Thursday night, with a heavy fall of rain...The south of England, and especially the country a hundred miles round London, with the metropolitan district itself, seem to have felt its extreme violence; and a vast amount of damage has been done to buildings and plantations, while many persons, in different parts of the country, and a few in London, lost their lives from various injuries...The gale subsided on the Friday afternoon; but its effects were not fully known till Monday, as many lines of telegraph had been interrupted...It seems, indeed, to have been a revolving storm, or cyclone, of vast circumference, having a diameter of not less than two hundred miles, covering nearly the whole of England, and connected with more extensive atmospheric disturbances beyond...A large unfinished structure in Shoreditch, belonging to the goods station of the Great Eastern Railway, lost one of its gable ends, but the workmen happily were absent'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.