People woke up to a world that looked like a giant had thrown a tantrum with a salad spinner. Fifteen million trees were flattened—that’s more trees than there are people in London and Liverpool combined. Imagine trying to get to your car when a 200-year-old oak is using it as a pillow. It was the great outdoors becoming the great indoors, and nobody had paid for that renovation.
Rush hour that morning was a comedy of errors, but nobody was laughing. Commuters in the southeast faced scenes straight out of a low-budget disaster movie: roads blocked by uprooted beeches, trains halted by fallen power lines, and a surprising number of people trying to use a wobbly hedge as a bus shelter. Nearly 3 million homes lost power, which meant no tea, no toast, and—for the truly brave—no charge for their brick-sized mobile phones.
Here’s a surprising fact: the storm killed 18 people in the UK, plus four more in France. That’s tragic, but given the damage, it’s almost miraculous. Most deaths came from falling trees and flying debris, not from the winds themselves. The storm wasn’t technically a hurricane—it was an extratropical cyclone—but try telling that to the man whose garden shed became a windsock.
Shocking photos show devastation left on London by Great Storm of 1987
The Night the Trees Learned to Fly
In the middle of the chaos, something magical happened: a barge in the English Channel broke free and smashed into a ferry. Yes, really. The general public, huddled around crackling radios, heard reports of a “runaway barge” and assumed the apocalypse had finally begun. Spoiler: it hadn’t, but the apocalypse probably took notes.
Perhaps the weirdest part of the whole affair was the reaction from the animals. Dolphins were spotted swimming unusually close to shore, as if they were trying to flag down a taxi to escape the wind. Meanwhile, seagulls—those airborne feathered menaces—apparently decided to sit this one out, clinging to chimneys like old men holding onto their hats. Nature was on pause, and it was terrifying.
Let’s not forget the humble caravan. Over 500 caravans were overturned in coastal areas, flipping onto their backs like grumpy turtles. If you ever needed proof that wind doesn’t have a sense of humour, this was it. The British Caravan Club never fully recovered their sense of dignity.
