Britain slips, slides and smiles to a halt

The heaviest snowfall to hit Britain in nearly 20 years brought chaos yesterday, crippling the transport network, closing thousands of schools and potentially costing the economy more than £1bn.

A blanket of snow, up to 31cm deep in some areas, covered much of the country in what the Met Office said was the deepest snowfall in the UK since February 1991. And the weather is set to get worse, with forecasters predicting that parts of the North-east and the Pennines could have up to 40cm of snow by today.

Gordon Brown said that the Government would do "everything in our power" to ensure that transport links were resumed.

In Wales, two climbers – brothers Christopher and James McCallion – were found dead on Mt Snowdon yesterday morning. And in Southmoor, Oxfordshire, a lorry driver was killed on the A420 in the afternoon after his vehicle collided with a car and crashed into the central reservation.

In London, where up to 27cm fell, all 700 bus routes – a total of 7,000 buses – were suspended for the first time in history. Not even during the Blitz were such measures taken. Similar chaos ensued on the Tube network. At one point, nine of the 11 London Underground lines were suspended or part-suspended.

More than 5,500 schools were closed across the South-east, including 4,000 in London, the Department for Children, Schools and Families said. A spokesman said it would not be until later today that the Government would be able to say how many schools in all were forced to close.

At airports, flights were cancelled and passengers stranded. At one point in the morning, both runways at Heathrow were closed. Those that did fly were subject to long delays. With the weather expected to become worse, passengers could be set for more woe. A BA spokesman said: "There will be some disruption. The forecast isn't good but it remains to be seen how many flights we can get up today. Every airline operating from Heathrow will have some disruption."

On the roads, traffic jams snaked along most motorways and major roads. The M25 had the worst tail-back. At about 9am, TomTom, the satellite navigation company, said that a queue of 53.8 miles stretched from Junction 19 at Watford to Junction 8 at Reigate. The A66 – the main road between Cumbria and North Yorkshire – was closed completely.

However, drivers in central London had some respite. The Mayor, Boris Johnson, who travelled to work on his bicycle, suspended the £8 congestion charge for the day and Islington Council, in north London, suspended all parking regulations.

The travel problems meant that an estimated one in five people failed to turn up to work yesterday and, with a lack of staff and an understandable lack of trade, many high street shops did not open. Various pundits predicted that the snow could cost the economy anywhere between £500m and £1.2bn. The higher figure, calculated by the Federation of Small Businesses, was based on an estimation that one in five people had been unable to make it in to work.

The arts world was also affected. Several performances at London theatres were cancelled, a meeting of singers to discuss the impact of the digital revolution was called off and the announcement of which artist has won a commission to build a sculpture in Ebbsfleet in Kent was postponed. Mr Johnson, speaking on BBC Radio 4, hit out at suggestions that more could have been done to prepare for the snow. "The gritters were out all night trying to get the roads safe for the buses to get from their depots on to the main roads which were clear enough for them to run," he said.

"The difficulty really has been that the volume of snow has been so huge that you can put down the grit, put down the salt, but then it simply snows over it again and you run the risk of unleashing a 12-tonne bus on to heavily packed snow or ice and turning it into a lethal weapon."

In Rothbury, Northumberland, an estimated 3,000 people were without gas after water flooded the main gas system. It could take up to two days before the problem is rectified.

Epsom, in Surrey, had the highest recorded snowfall, at 31cm (just over a foot). Nine other areas, including parts of Yorkshire and Northumberland, had more than 10cm.

Meanwhile, in America

*As weather forecasters in Britain warned of more blizzards in the coming days, a similarly pessimistic prediction was made by Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog in the United States. Phil is the latest in the famous line of weather-savvy rodents whose appearance is said to herald the end of winter. But when he finally poked his nose out of his burrow yesterday morning, he promptly "saw his own shadow": apparently a sure sign that winter will not be over for another six weeks. Groundhogs in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, have been tasked with predicting the length of winter for 123 years. The event was made famous by the 1993 film Groundhog Day, with Bill Murray.......... chris Green