Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast · Brad Choma

The Regent's Park Skating Disaster of 1867 | Episode 98

·52 min·3 clips

Ice suddenly breaks killing hundreds instantly

Pack skates, apparently. The host opens on ice skating as the cheerful art of strapping cutlery to your feet, bruising yourself, and maybe ending the afternoon in water. Regent's Park gets a guided tour first, and it is not all pretty paths and winter fun. Before the disaster closes in, the episode points back to axe-murderers, corpse thieves, and child labor body pits. Nice place for a glide. The skating history is just as odd. Early skates are animal femurs, which makes crossing frozen ground sound only a little less miserable than staying put. Then the Dutch improve things with steel blades in the Middle Ages, though the gear still sounds heavy, awkward, and rough on the feet. After another 400 or 500 years, the blades get smoother and start looking closer to the boot-and-blade setup people would know now. Fashion eventually joins the ice. By the 1700s and 1800s, skating has moved from survival trick to fashionable pastime and then sport. January 15, 1867, is where the mood turns. From sunrise on, crowds pour into Regent's Park for the simple pleasure of sliding across a frozen lake. By 3:30, the light is dropping. At least 500 people are on the ice, and as many as 3,000 watch from the banks like they have found the slipperiest show in London. The host even pauses on the word rink, because disaster apparently comes with vocabulary homework. Then comes John Gamgee's Glaciarium, an 1840s chemical skating surface that sounds clever, waxy, strange, and possibly poisonous enough to make dull whitish-grey natural ice seem comforting. For a while, the park still feels cheerful. People laugh, learn how not to fall, and treat the lake like harmless winter entertainment. Then it makes a sound. Skaters freeze, the crowd listens, and the centre section drops several inches as water surges over the edge. The fun has no time to fade gently. It just breaks.

As heard by us

A Victorian skating spectacle at Regent's Park turns fashion, old skate technology, and ominous ice into gathering dread.

Regent's Park opens here as a lovely London green space with a brutal past, then becomes the stage for Victorian spectacle: hundreds of skaters and thousands of onlookers gathered on January 15, 1867.

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Why you'd press play

For a Victorian London skating afternoon that turns ominous when the lake makes a sound, press play.

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