Our hottest hour: sweat, toil, tears and more sweat

An Economist editor reflects on his countrymen’s inability to cope with record high temperatures

By Edward McBride

The British, the stereotype runs, love to talk about the weather. So imagine the endless, breathless and thrillingly menacing conversations that preceded what, the weathermen predicted, would be the country’s hottest day ever. My sister and I discussed where best to flee when our homes became uninhabitable; the consensus was a relative’s always-frigid basement flat. What would be more hazardous, a friend wondered, walking for 30 minutes in the midday sun to a meeting or riding one stop in the infernal swelter of the London Underground? Would it be safe to take the dog out, asked a woman in my neighbourhood, given that the pavements were predicted to be throwing off heat like a tandoor oven?

Trains were cancelled over worries that the heat would expand the tracks so much that the lines would buckle

Such alarm was understandable, given the tenor of official pronouncements. The Royal Parks, an agency that looks after central London’s most famous leafy havens, declared itself to be on “fire watch”. The BBC discussed at great length exactly why it was, physiologically, that so many people died when the mercury rose. The Met Office, the highest authority on the weather in the land, issued its first ever “red warning” for extreme heat.

My wife, who is Australian, and is normally caught off guard by how cold and wet Britain can be in summer, was in her element. She closed all the curtains, pulled down the blinds and shut doors at strategic spots around the house. She and I made contingency plans to sleep not on the stuffy top floor, as we normally do, but on an inflatable mattress in a cooler part of the house – although she later said it wasn’t hot enough to invoke them. Almost no homes in Britain have air-conditioning, although a colleague gloated about having managed to buy a free-standing unit.

Cinema revels in the cliché of red-faced British colonisers, thick woollen military uniforms sodden with sweat, defying the blazing sun to terrorise the locals in assorted tropical climes. But whatever resilience and fortitude the British used to possess in the face of heat seems to have evaporated along with their empire. Today’s authorities issued warnings against all the things one might naturally do in the heat: swimming in lakes and rivers, lighting barbecues in the park, even commuting to offices to bask in the climate-controlled air.

The air force suspended flights at an especially toasty base

Trains were cancelled over worries that the heat would expand the tracks so much that the lines would buckle. The air force suspended flights at an especially toasty base. Although the show went on at a play I was watching in a big London theatre, the producer came on stage to explain there would be an extra, unscheduled intermission just before the finale, to allow the venue’s overheating machinery to cool down. The press, as ever, revelled in the adversity: “Blowtorch Britain” bellowed the Daily Mirror; “Hotter than the Sahara” wailed the Sun.

When the day predicted to be the peak of the heatwave arrived, I defied the official advice to avoid all travel and set off on my bike for work. I was shocked to see a dusty haze distorting the normal view of the park at the end of my street – until I realised that the dust came from sawing at a nearby building site. All the same, the soil in the park had dried out enough to crack its big lawns. The patches of lifeless brown grass seemed more suited to La Mancha than London.

Climate scientists send out pre-emptive emails to the press declaring that, yes, global warming is definitely responsible

Before this week the hottest temperature ever recorded in Britain was 38.7°C, in 2019 in Cambridge, which I think of as a damp and chilly place surrounded by marshes. On July 19th that record was indeed broken: temperatures topped 40°C at several places in London and peaked at 40.3°C in Lincolnshire, 100 miles to the north. Kensington Gardens was not engulfed in flames and most dogs, in my neighbourhood at least, do not appear to have scorched their paws. The ululation about hitting 40°C might seem hysterical when other parts of Europe are enduring far more ferocious heatwaves. But the truth is, London is no more suited to 40°C than Madrid to 50°C.

The heat does indeed claim lives, especially among the old and infirm. London’s older hospitals, like its houses, are not air conditioned. There has been a surge in calls to the emergency services. Several spontaneous swims have ended in drownings.

Underscoring the grim statistics is the knowledge that such events are becoming ever more common. So bored are some climate scientists of telling journalists that these temperatures could not occur through natural variation, The Economist’s environment correspondent notes, that they have started sending out pre-emptive emails to all their contacts in the press declaring that, yes, global warming is definitely responsible. (One television presenter, whingeing about the gloomy forecast, wondered with a laugh what has turned meteorologists into “harbingers of doom”; the weatherman was not amused.)

Of course, Britain will adapt. Railway maintenance crews are painting the tracks white, to reflect some sunlight and thus keep the metal cooler. The Royal Air Force has relocated some training flights to the country’s cooler fringes. And commuters need no excuse to work from home these days, as my barber grumbled to me in an empty salon in the centre of the city. All the same, and for all my amusement at the more histrionic responses to the heatwave, perhaps the British are right: this is no time to keep calm and carry on.

Edward McBride is deputy foreign editor for The Economist

Photographs: Dougie Wallace

Discover more

1843 magazine | Djibouti, the port-state squeezed by the Houthis’ Red Sea campaign

While warships protect cargo, migrants trying to reach the Middle East are on their own

1843 magazine | How a trucker became a deadly people smuggler

Transporting undocumented migrants across America can seem like easy money – until everything goes wrong


1843 magazine | Tinnitus nearly drove me mad

I have had to learn to live in a world without silence