200 years of Reading's Weather

200 years of Reading's Weather opens at Watlington House on Saturday 21 November, an exhibition that does exactly what the title says: it looks back at two centuries of weather in Reading. It's a local history project that takes the thing we all talk about most — the weather — and stretches it across two hundred years of the town's own records.

Two centuries is a long time to be keeping track of the rain and the temperature. The exhibition pulls from that archive to show how the weather has shifted over the generations, and how the town has lived through it. It's not just a collection of numbers and dates; it's about the actual conditions that people here have dealt with, from the mild years to the ones that probably made for a very different kind of winter.

Watlington House is the spot for it, and it's free to get in, so you can just drop by and spend as much or as little time as you like with the records. It's the kind of thing that works as well as a quick look-through as it does if you're the sort who likes to stop and compare the 1820s to the 1920s and see what's changed. If you've ever wondered how a Reading winter compares to the ones your grandparents talked about, this is where you'll find the answer.

It opens on Saturday 21 November at 2:00 PM at Watlington House, and entry is free.