A Thousand Words for Weather takes place across three floors of London’s most iconic library as a sonic installation born out of a collaboration between writer Jessica J. Lee and seven other London-based poets of different mother-tongues. 

Each poet chose and defined ten words for the weather in Arabic, Bengali, English, German, French, Mandarin, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, or Urdu. They then went on to translate one another's chosen weather words or phrases, contributing to a unique multilingual weather ‘dictionary’ that seeks to generate a shared language describing our collective experience of climate and the changing environment while exploring the nuance of meaning in translating and describing our multilingual realities.  

These words form a sound piece created by sound artist Claudia Molitor and integrated with a bespoke playback system designed by software architect Peter Chilvers that inputs data from the Met Office, enabling the sound to be altered depending on the weather outside.

Alongside the audio installations, the new exhibition 'Weather Notes' of historical items chosen from Senate House Library’s collections will offer a glimpse into different perceptions, recordings, and observations regarding the weather over the past 500 years.

You can view all the items on display in our online gallery.

Visitors will be able to interact with a series of listening posts installed throughout the library, with all admissions taking place during library opening hours.

Find out more about visiting the library.

If you are interested in joining the library, visit our Membership page.

During the nine month run of the exhibition we are encouraging visitors to contribute to a growing collective weather diary.

Looking out of the window, how is the weather right now? How does it make you feel? Do you remember a time when the weather played an important role in your life?