Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's

bestselling History Magazine.

I'm Ellie Corporn.

So Britain, the winter of 1962 and 63, was the worst in living memory.

The solvent froze, icebergs stalked the Irish sea, and the nation ground to a frozen

halt.

But as Juliet Nicholson quarry calls in her new book Frost Quake, as Britain shivered

under a blanket of snow and ice, new cultural and political forces were beginning to challenge

the status quo.

As the Beatles, David Bailey and Mary Quant began to shake things up, here, in conversation

with our production editor Spencer Mizzet, Juliet reveals how those few frozen months at

the start of the 60s changed modern Britain for good.

Juliet, your new book Frost Quake tells a story of the great freeze that paralyzed Britain

over the winter of 1962 and 63, and it also chronicles how the country emerged that spring

in summer at different country.

Now before examining all that in more detail, I wonder if you could paint a picture of how

bad the winter of 1962, stroke 63, was.

How unprecedented was this weather?

There had obviously been lots of snowy winters in people's memories before they arrived

at 1962. There was a particularly ferocious one in 1947, which I think made an enormous

impact particularly because it was only a couple of years after the ending of the Second

World War and deprivation and misery were still there and the weather on top of it, extremely

...