The Bodleian Frost Fair Map | Kristjana S Williams

The Bodleian Frost Fair Map 

From the archives of the Bodleian Library comes a story frozen in time.

Commissioned for the Bodleian Library in Oxford, The Bodleian Frost Fair Map draws directly from original ephemera held within the Library’s extraordinary collections. It revisits a remarkable chapter in London’s history, when the Thames froze solid and the city took to the ice. During the Little Ice Age, prolonged winters repeatedly halted the river’s flow, transforming it into a temporary thoroughfare alive with stalls, games, printing presses, and public spectacle.

Historic maps and broadsides from the period capture these events in vivid detail, documenting not only the frozen Thames but the ingenuity, resilience, and communal spirit of the Londoners who gathered upon it. This artwork reimagines that material as a richly layered cartographic scene, combining fragments of archival imagery with Kristjana’s distinctive visual language to depict a London that feels both familiar and astonishingly altered.

The project continues a long-standing dialogue between Kristjana’s work and the Bodleian Library — a shared fascination with maps, myth, and the ways knowledge is recorded, preserved, and reinterpreted over time.

Working directly from historic sources, the artwork honours the Bodleian’s role as custodian of these fragile narratives, translating centuries-old documents into a contemporary printed form.