Just before 11am in a fashionable part of north London, Caroline Phillips, a freelance writer, thought the apocalypse had come.
Sitting at the front window of her home writing about the benefits of complementary therapy, she looked up to see the sky turn black. A grey tornado, taller than a house, spewing debris and roaring like a jet, was heading straight for her.
"I dived under my desk and started screaming hysterically," she said. "I had my arms over my head. I heard the windows shatter all over the house."
Roofs were ripped off cars, dustbins took to the air and the facades of houses crumbled to expose the insides of children's bedrooms, as an 540m tornado, gusting to 177kph, tore through the area.
The tornado came amid wild weather across much of the UK on Thursday. More than 60 flights out of London-Heathrow airport were canceled, trains were delayed in the south of England after flooding, P&O ferry services between Dover and Calais were canceled and huge seas raged off the Welsh coast in force 11 storms.
A lifeboat crew had to be winched to safety off the Sussex coast in the south of England after getting into trouble as they tried to anchor a barge which had broken from its moorings in force 10 gales. The crew were airlifted to shore but the barge smashed into cliffs.
The weather reached its climax when the tornado struck the grid of tree-lined avenues in north London, wreaking havoc in just 10 seconds. It was closely followed by hail storms and torrential rain. Six people were injured and up to 150 houses were damaged in the tornado, which came out of Atlantic thunderstorms blowing north east on 96kph gusts of wind.
Nathan Sweeney said he was in his bedroom when the tornado hit.
"There was a roar that sounded like an aeroplane, then everything went dark and my windows blew in," he said. "Out the back of our house all the gardens are now one, all the fences have gone."
One man was taken to hospital after being struck in the head by the debris which was flung from the tornado as it spread.
Although it appeared freakish, the Tornado and Storm Research Center said the UK had the highest number of tornadoes for its land area of any country in the world.
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