The UK doesn't get snow like continental Europe or North America, and that's exactly why the big events stand out so clearly when they happen. A run of genuinely major snow winters over the past three decades has given the country a fairly short list of storms everyone still talks about. Here are the ones that made the biggest mark.
Winter 2009-10: the coldest in a generation
Beginning in mid-December 2009 and running through to a thaw in mid- January, this spell brought the UK's coldest winter in 31 years, since 1978-79. Snow depths reached 36cm at Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands during the second week of January 2010, and by 7 January the country was almost entirely blanketed, visible even from satellite imagery. Overnight temperatures across England and Wales regularly fell to minus 5 to minus 10°C, with some spots considerably colder. It ranks as the seventh coldest UK winter of the past century, but it's the widespread, sustained snow cover across virtually the whole country that people remember most.
December 2010: the coldest December in 100 years
Less than a year later, the UK was hit again, this time by what became the coldest December on record since the Met Office's national records began, with a mean temperature of minus 1°C. In the longer Central England Temperature series, which stretches back to 1659, it fell just 0.1°C short of the all-time coldest December, set in 1890. The snow that came with it was substantial: a maximum depth of 76cm was recorded on 1 December across parts of the Peak District, Sheffield, Doncaster, the Cotswold Hills and the Forest of Dean. Over the course of the wider 2010-11 winter, Sheffield's snowfall accumulation reached 1.5 metres, the highest total anywhere in the country that season. Heavy snowfalls also hit Scotland's Central Belt in early December, with 29cm recorded at Edinburgh and up to 60cm at higher ground nearby.
February-March 2018: the Beast from the East
Easily the most talked-about UK snow event of the last decade. Cold air that started in Siberia at around minus 50°C tracked west, picking up moisture over the North Sea, and combined with Storm Emma arriving from the Azores to produce a week of heavy, wind-driven snow across the UK and Ireland from 26 February into early March 2018. Widely reported snow depths exceeded 50cm in places, with drifting pushing some localised totals considerably higher. The Met Office issued red weather warnings for parts of southern England, something that had rarely happened for snow before. It was, by several measures, the snowiest spell for large parts of the UK since January 1982, and the coldest since December 2010. The economic disruption alone was estimated by the CBI at roughly £1 billion a day across the worst-affected period, with thousands of schools closed, transport networks shut down, and the army deployed to reach stranded drivers.
What ties these events together
None of these three winters happened by accident, and they share a common trigger: a weakening or reversal of the usual westerly flow that normally keeps the UK mild and wet, replaced by a cold easterly or northerly airstream drawing air in from Scandinavia, Russia or the Arctic. When that pattern locks in for an extended period, as it did in all three cases, the UK stops behaving like its usual maritime self and starts behaving like a much colder, more continental climate for a few weeks at a time. That's a genuinely unusual state of affairs for a country whose winters are normally defined more by rain and wind than by snow, which is exactly why, when it does happen, it tends to be remembered for years afterward.