Not many places are namechecked on the BBC eight times a day, but forecast familiarity hasn’t inspired a flood of visitors. (The island off south-west Norway has been officially spelled with an “a” since 1924, though neither North or South Utsire appeared in the shipping forecast until they were introduced in 1984.) Reached by a heaving, churning 70-minute ferry ride across some of the most tempestuous waters in northern Europe, Utsira wears its forecast fame lightly. Not many people can say they’ve been to Utsira. The shipping forecast is the closest I ever came to reading out poetry on the air BBC broadcaster Charlotte Green The forecast always progresses in the same order around its 31 sea areas, beginning with Viking off the coast of Norway and moving broadly clockwise, zigzagging across the North Sea, along the Channel, turning south towards the Iberian peninsula then tracing the Atlantic fringe back up to south-east Iceland.įor those not out at sea, it’s a journey to fire the imagination without lifting your head from the pillow, a 31-stop tour better measured in duvet togs than kilometres, an odyssey in the mind through familiar places – Dover, Hebrides, Wight – and locations that seem to defy conventional mapping: Fisher, Sole, North Utsire. An early map of the UK shipping forecast areas.
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