Aerial view of Hornsey, Crouch End and the City of London

© Matt Cooper/Gallery Stoc

Dreaming of a white Christmas. Snowy London

Welcome to the skies above north London which, in our homepage photo at least, has been covered with a festive dusting of snow. But while Dickensian scenes of snowy Christmases are fixed in the collective imagination, these days, snow rarely falls in serious amounts across the UK in December.

The Met Office defines a white Christmas as one where a single snowflake is observed falling at one of various sites in the UK, on 25 December - which is not exactly a Bing Crosby-style white Christmas. Only four times in the last 51 years has widespread snow covering, where more than 40% of UK weather stations report snow on the ground at 9am on Christmas Day, been reported: 1981, 1995, 2009 and 2010.

Scotland is more likely to see December snow than the rest of the UK - the deepest snow recorded on Christmas Day in the last 50 years fell in Kindrogan, Perthshire in 1981, when it was 47cm deep. Now that’s the sort of thing Bing was singing about.