John Evelyn describes a Frost Fair on the Thames

January, 1684. “The weather continuing intolerably severe, streets of booths were set upon the Thames; the air was so very cold and thick, as of many years, there had not ben the like. The small pox was very mortal,” says the Diary of John Evelyn, in the 1879 edition by William Bray.

The great chronicler of Restoration England reported days later that “The frost continuing more and more severe, the Thames before London was still planted with booths in formal streetes, all sorts of trades and shops furnish’d and full of commodities, even to a printing presse, where the people and ladyes tooke a fancy to have their names printed, and the day and year set down when printed on the Thames; this humour tooke so universally, that ’twas estimated the printer gain’d £5 a day, for printing a line only, at sixpence a name, besides what he got by ballads, &c. Coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple.”

On 4 February Evelyn repaired to his garden at Sayes Court, Lewisham “where I found many of the greenes and rare plantes utterly destroyed. The oranges and mirtills very sick, the rosemary and laurels dead to all appearance, but y^e cypress likely to endure.”

The next day “It began to thaw but froze again. My coach crossed from Lambeth to the Horseferry at Millbank, Westminster. The booths were almost all taken downe, but there was first a map or a landskip cut in copper representing all manner of the camp, and the several actions, sports and pastimes thereon, in memory of so signal a frost.”