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Roger Hunt Bishopsteignton, DevonHead of London Weather Centre,1984–1988

On Friday, 12th September, 2006, the MetOffice stopped forecasting the weatherfrom its London office. This was a significantevent in the history of the organization asthere has been a major meteorologicaloffice site in London ever since the organi-zation was founded. The office began its lifein 1854 and its first home was in ParliamentStreet. It moved to Victoria Street in 1869and then, in 1910, to Exhibition Road, SouthKensington (Figure 1).

The Directorate and the forecast andmarine sections – effectively the Meteoro-logical Office headquarters – moved to theAir Ministry in Kingsway in 1919, beforesettling into nearby Victory House in 1938.The forecasting section moved during theSecond World War to Dunstable, while theDirectorate stayed in Victory House until1961 when it moved to Bracknell.

It was in August 1959 that London

Weather Centre (LWC) opened in PrincesHouse, Kingsway in Holborn, not far fromthe previous premises of the London Fore-cast Office at Victory House. LWC becamethe public focus for the Met Office, widelyknown across the UK through its nationalmedia output and the observations takenfrom its various roofs.

Vast improvements in the accuracy ofnumerically produced forecasts combinedwith big changes in communicationmethods, a substantial increase in theamount of weather information readilyavailable to the public and a changingmarket for commercial weather serviceshave all taken place in recent years. There isno longer a requirement for a specific public-facing office producing forecastsacross a range of markets. Weather fore-casting has therefore ceased, leaving apremises which is still being used formeetings, media work and some other tasks.

London Weather CentreThe concept of weather centres, aimed atthe business community and the public,developed during the 1950s at least partly in

response to the success of the Festival ofBritain in 1951, which contained a Dome ofDiscovery. This included a working weatherforecast office exhibition. After that, the MetOffice launched a Centenary Exhibition – its100th anniversary was in 1954 – whichtoured the country. Both of these exhibi-tions demonstrated what most working inthe organization as well as outside probablyknew already – that there was a great publicinterest in weather. There was also agrowing demand from business to takebetter account of it in terms of improvingprofitability and customer service. Theresponse to the demand was the develop-ment of a weather centre network, startingin London in 1959, with the specific aim ofbeing an approachable point of contactwith the Met Office for the public andbusiness (Figure 2). It was a key element thatthe public could actually visit LWC and seethe work at first hand as well as have contactby telephone.

I visited it myself around about when itopened, perhaps in 1960. My parents werekeen for me to see it, knowing it was theplace to go for someone with an interest inweather and a thermometer and raingaugein the garden – with extremely dubiousexposures, of course. I have to say I don’tremember much about the visit, other thancoming home armed with charts and havingmet Jack Armstrong, a voice and name Iknew from the radio and TV broadcasts. Butit served to fuel my interest in LWC andmade my return there some 24 years later ina rather different guise all the moreenjoyable.

Over the next 20 years or so, the networkof weather centres expanded to 13, based inprincipal cities around the country,eventually leading to a regionalizedapproach to both forecasting and customerservice. This dual approach dealt with themarketing aspects (although I don’t thinkthe ‘m’ word was used much in the earlydays) and the technical capabilities ofweather forecasting. In the latter regard,forecasting was much more of a manualprocess than it is today while the amount ofdata available that could be processed andcommunicated was very much less than

The end of weather forecasting at Met Office London

Figure 1. The Meteorological Office headquarters, Exhibition Road, South Kensington. This was theheadquarters from November 1910 until November 1919.

now. Local forecasters were able to uselocally sourced information combined withlocal knowledge to add value to theguidance forecasts produced centrally. Theywere able to produce forecast services of ahigher quality than those that could beproduced from Headquarters and tocommunicate them within their region.

Within the regional network, and for mostof the time since it opened, LWC was the‘main’ weather centre, since it had thelargest number of staff. It had a national aswell as regional role; for example, for muchof its life it possessed a fully equipped studiofrom which national radio forecasts wereproduced and a frontage in the heart of thecapital that thousands of people passed by,and looked into, every day. It also had anational responsibility for the media and formuch of the period was the forecast centrefor the offshore industry around the UK.

LWC moved home a couple of times. In1965 it moved to the bigger, more spacious,Penderel House in High Holborn where itstayed for 27 years, moving to ClerkenwellRoad in 1992. (In between it moved floors atPenderel House – one of those jobs thatmight sound relatively simple but isn’t.) Themove to Clerkenwell Road was largely dueto the changing requirements of a modernforecast organization in terms of IT connec-tivity and systems. LWC also underwent aname change. At the time of the organiza-tional re-branding in 2000, the Met Officetook the opportunity to scrap the term‘weather centre’. All of its outstations wereidentified by the Met Office name and thelocation. LWC thus became Met Office

London. (Of course the BBC was in a differ-ent position and it retained the name BBCWeather Centre for the jointly mannedBBC/Met Office site at the TV Centre.)

ServicesOver the years, a wide range of services wascarried out from the office, far too many tolist here. From the start, it was responsiblefor providing services to the BBC, with thenational TV presenters being based at LWC,working there when they weren’t actuallydoing television work. As noted above,there was a fully equipped radio studio atPenderel House and the public could watchthe forecasters doing their live nationalradio broadcasts from the street throughthe studio window. Fortunately the broad-casters sat with their backs to the window soweren’t able to see any members of thepublic trying to put them off. Forecasts werealso provided to the Press Association foronward transmission to many of thenational and regional newspapers, as well asdirect to a few. LWC quickly became theprime source of media services for the MetOffice.

The so-called Automatic TelephoneWeather Service (ATWS) was provided out ofLWC. This consisted of a forecast recordedon site by Met Office staff – not always thatclearly, it has to be said – which diallers ofthe appropriate numbers could pick up at arelatively low charge. The service was aimedat helping to deal with the vast numbers ofpeople who phoned LWC for a basic, freelyprovided forecast and who were often in

danger of clogging up the phone system –in the early 1960s, for example, there wereover 200 000 calls to LWC each year.

Another big activity for LWC for part of itslife was providing services to the newlydeveloping offshore industry, primarily inthe North Sea. Indeed for a number of years,in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the biggestsingle element of the office’s services. Thisdevelopment, among other things, servedas a good experience for the Met Office as,along with its competitors, it developed amore commercial edge, led from its Londonoffice.

It wasn’t just forecast services that wereprovided out of LWC. At a central location inthe capital city, observations from LWC wereof key importance to the public and a rangeof businesses (Figure 3). The changing loca-tions of LWC led to difficulties here with therequirement to ensure observations fromthe new and old sites were kept goingtogether for a long period to allow compar-ison to occur (Figure 4). As well as the moreserious needs, observations from LWCbecame well used in the betting sector toverify the white Christmas bets. The defini-tion of a white Christmas for this purpose isbased on whether observers see asnowflake in the 24-hour period ofChristmas Day. Naturally this has led tosome very grey Christmases being declaredwhite and the odd truly white one, in thesense that there was snow on the ground,being declared not white because snowdidn’t actually fall on the day. Neverthelessit has become a significant part of the pre-Christmas build up and has extended fromthe roof of the London office to other sitesaround the country.

During its time, the London climate unitproduced a wide range of past weather dataand statistics. After the Met Office ceasedpublication of the Daily Weather Report in1981, LWC started its highly regarded anduseful Daily Weather Summary which is stillaround today. In fact, production ceased atLondon in 1997 with a new automatedproduct emanating from Met Office head-quarters in Bracknell. This is now in colourand in some ways has allowed the productto turn full circle back to the old DailyWeather Report.

The shop front at Penderel House was akey (and expensive) element of LWC. Overthe 1980s and up to the period of the moveto Clerkenwell Road, the shop developedand became a notable feature in the area.Indeed, one of the more bizarre achieve-ments of the then LWC was to find the shopmentioned in Time Out magazine within itslist of ‘Places to visit while in London’. Aswell as the sale of books, charts and evenclothing – it achieved a turnover of gettingon for £100 000 without much resourceapplied to it – the shop was visited by largenumbers of people wanting to look at the

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Figure 2. This photograph of the London Weather Centre in Kingsway dates from about 1961. London WeatherCentre opened in August 1959 and stayed in Kingsway until January 1965 when it relocated to High Holborn.

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current weather displays and have a chatwith the shop staff who were famouslywilling to oblige.

Changing timesServices to the BBC grew over the years,with a vast increase in the number of TVbroadcasts from the early days – includingthe advent of the BBC channel News24 – aswell as a huge range of national and localradio forecasts, Ceefax and ultimately onlineoutput. The growing relationship betweenthe BBC and the Met Office blossomed andeventually all services carried out by the MetOffice for the BBC moved across to the BBCWeather Centre at White City in WestLondon. The national radio work was trans-ferred in 1991. Undoubtedly this was a goodthing for both organizations in terms ofoverall services to the public, but it didremove some of the profile of the old LWC.Also around this period services to ITV werestarted for the first time – but again thesewere mainly provided at specialist premisesin the environment of the customer. Theconcept of a generalized forecast office wasbeginning to weaken.

Massive changes in technology were alsotaking place in the 1970s, 1980s andbeyond. Services to the newspapers providea good example. In the mid-1980s, a mar-keting and sales campaign was initiated forthe national press. Massive changes wereshaking the newspaper industry. The movetowards new printing and publishing tech-nologies and the conflict between thenewspaper owners and the print unionsculminated in new offices being set up inWapping. The decline of Fleet Street meantthat telexed, scripted forecasts, more or lessunchanged for decades, were no longerappropriate. A more graphical presentationwas clearly required. So LWC produced a setof symbols and most papers were keeneither to get their hands on maps with thesesymbols or to create their own symbols andgive them to us to produce their services forthem. Having successfully increased thebusiness by a vast amount in this sector, theonly ways of getting the information to thecustomer were tortuous in the extreme.With some customers, LWCs staff, havingprepared the forecast for the next day, hadto place symbols cut out from sheets ontothe UK maps, photocopy them and sendthem to (or in some cases have them collec-ted by) the newspapers. Unfortunately thephotocopiers required the pages with thesymbols on them to be turned upside downfirst so the symbols fell off. A clear plasticwallet was produced by resourceful staff sothe symbols could be kept relatively still.Even so, they often moved and there weremany occasions when some papers (I seemto recall The Guardian in particular) werepublished with symbols slightly in the

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Figure 3. The roof of London Weather Centre, Kingsway. Scientific Assistant Miss BrendaEisen checking the rain gauge. In the background is a Decca Type 41 Storm Warning radarscanner. This photo was taken in September 1959.

Figure 4. An Assistant telephoning the weather observation from the roof of State House to the weather centrein Penderel House, High Holborn. The exposure on the roof of Penderel House was poor so the observing sitewas situated across the road from the weather centre on the roof of State House and the observationstelephoned across the road every hour. This photograph was taken in 1965 and shows the view looking south-eastwards towards St Paul’s Cathedral and (a still-functioning) Bankside Power Station.

wrong place and at right angles. Of courselater developments in desktop publishingtook away all those problems.

Improvements in communications tech-nology generally changed the skills require-ments at LWC. At one point there were three24-hour rosters of specialist teleprinter offi-cers – a total of 15 people from a total staffof almost 100 in the early 1980s. The last ofthe teleprinter operators went in 1986. Thechanges in service production for the off-shore market and the BBC alluded to abovealso had a considerable impact on staffnumbers such that total numbers weredown to about 20 by 2005.

StaffAs with all forecast offices, LWCs Met OfficeLondon staff have shown themselves to beremarkably resilient in the face of adversity.On a number of occasions the output wasmaintained on schedule thanks to the staffstaying on duty well after the night shift hadcompleted, for example, or staying the nightin the office to carry on work the followingmorning. The Great Storm of October 1987was such an example. None of the day shiftwere able to get in so as well as having todeal with an increasingly aggressive media –the BBC interview the following morning ofan extremely tired looking Ian McCaskillwho, as well as being one of the most recog-nized faces in the organization, had beenthe duty night shift leader, was long remem-bered by many – the night shift had to carryon with their normal schedules through thefollowing day. There appears to have beenonly one occasion when Met Office Londonwas left unstaffed for a night shift and thatwas, tragically, on 7/8 July 2005 after the

terrorist bombings in the centre of London.The dedication of the day shift and thosewho came in very early the next morning tocover was typical over the years.

Customers often thanked the staff fortheir efforts, often in the fairly traditionalway of sending in food and drink atChristmas time. Not all customers were soconventional, however, and on one night in1991, a large truck drew up outside the HighHolborn office full of produce for CoventGarden market. The doorbell rang and thestaff found that a grateful farmer had askedthe driver to drop off a crate of cauliflowersfor the staff by way of thanks. While this mayhave been an unusual gift – and I’m surethere were others over the years – theextremely high regard the LWC staff wereheld in by the London public and customershas been a source of pride both for all thestaff and the Met Office as a whole.

The futureSo, with the trends towards either carryingout forecast service production remotely or,in some cases, to actually go into the cus-tomer environment and be part of theirteam and to more clearly separating salesand marketing from production, there is nolonger a requirement for forecast produc-tion in a generalized London office.

The massive improvement in forecastmodel output produced out of the MetOffice’s Headquarters in Exeter has, in effect,taken away that need. At the same time, theincreased quality output now available onthe Internet from a range of sources haschanged the market for the Met Office’scommercial weather services from its hey-day in the 1990s. There are still Met Office

forecasters and broadcast meteorologistsworking in London – at the BBC and ITNHouse – while a recent innovation has seenthe arrival of two consultant meteorologistsproviding support for the Met Office’s publicservices, especially related to warnings, inthe London area. They have remained inClerkenwell Road as well as two specialistadvisers to highways and local authoritiesand the Met Office’s Chief Adviser toGovernment. Alex Hill, who has been thelongest serving Head of the London office,taking over the role in 1997, works out of theoffice there as the area manager while someof the premises are also being used formeetings and other purposes. Met OfficeLondon, formerly London Weather Centre, ispart of the Met Office’s illustrious history.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank John Hammond at theMet Office Press Office and MargaretEmerson and Alex Hill for their helpful infor-mation on some of the history of theLondon office.

An article written by Mary Buchanan andappearing in Weather back in May 1994(Vol. 49, pp. 181–185) may be of relatedinterest. It was entitled ‘Reminiscences of a very junior member of the Met Office,Victory House 1940–1946’ and offersanother insight into weather forecastingLondon, in years gone by.

Correspondence to: Mr Roger Hunt

Email: enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk

© Royal Meteorological Society, 2007

DOI: 10/1002/wea.81

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A magnificent display of noctilucent cloud as seen from York at 0307 BST on 23 June 2006. (© John Jackson.)