Abstract

There is growing concern over the impacts of inter-annual climate variability and anomalous and ‘extreme’ weather events such as droughts, floods, storm events and unusually high or low temperatures. While social and economic systems have generally evolved to accommodate some deviations from “normal” weather conditions, this is rarely true of extremes. Attempts to better understand the nature of future events and specifically the socio-economic impacts of and responses to these traumatic events, must consider the characteristics and repercussions of similar events in recent centuries for which most data are available (Alexander et al., 2009). Drawing on work conducted as part of an ongoing AHRC project focusing on archival investigations of past weather extremes, I wish to explore through selected UK based case studies how different types of events, including floods, extreme heat and cold, extreme cold and storms, over recent centuries affected the lives of local people and became inscribed into the cultural fabric and social memory in the form of oral history, ideology, custom, behaviour, narrative, artefact, technological and physical adaptation, including adaptations to the working landscape and built environment. These different forms of remembering and recording represent central media through which information on past events was curated, recycled and transmitted across generations.