In a country where summer, as George II once noted, tends to be “three fine days and a storm”, predictions that temperatures could break the 40C barrier next week are enough to send shivers down the spine of spine. Metaphorically speaking, of course. But how does this spell of blisteringly hot weather – so intense that the Met Office has issued a red alert – compare to what has become the gold standard of hot UK summers: 1976? That year, Britons were struggling with droughts, road rage and a minister urging married couples to save water by bathing together. Are we now experiencing something that will put even this collective memory in the proverbial shade? “This won’t last as long or be as dry as 1976,” says Professor Hannah Cloke, an expert in weather hazards, climate change and hydrology at the University of Reading. “But the problem is that, 46 years ago, that summer was a highly unusual event for a very local area – the UK. “The system we have now is much wider – it’s right across Europe – and, more worryingly, it’s no longer uncommon. It’s part of a pattern where these widespread extreme events are becoming more frequent. “So we’re talking today about 40 degrees Celsius being unprecedented here, but in a few years – as the effects of climate change become more pronounced – that will no longer be the case.” Spectators at Wimbledon protect themselves from the sun by wearing newspaper hats and books on their heads during the heat wave of 1976 (Getty) Back in 1976 itself, there were an amazing 15 consecutive days that saw the mercury reach 32C somewhere in the UK. On 3 July, the country’s (then) hottest temperature was recorded at Cheltenham: 35.9 C. Some parts of the south west went 45 days without rain. So intense was the heat that it was widely blamed for a 20 percent increase in excess deaths that year, while the number of hospital patients suffering from sunstroke and heat exhaustion rose. In a grim and perhaps unexpected result, domestic violence also appeared to spiral, with London’s Met Police dealing with 600 more cases each day than average. Fires were raging in Epping Forest in Essex and Bellerby Moor in North Yorkshire. Thousands of acres of crops failed. Even Wimbledon – that one-time bastion of the British stiff upper lip – caved in: officials took the once-unthinkable decision that referees would be allowed to take off their jackets (although similar laxity was not allowed in the House of Commons, where its staff bar left after being told they must continue to wear their official green livery). Eventually, as it emerged that London had just 90 days of water, he was appointed Drought Minister by Labor Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. Denis (later Lord) Howell urged people to abide by the government’s pipe ban, oversaw the laying of pipes in some streets (mostly in much of Wales) and famously told reporters that he had taken a bath with his wife. Then, a week after his date, it started to rain. Now, while the same level of disruption isn’t predicted this summer, it shouldn’t, experts say, be taken as a sign that severe weather isn’t as problematic as it was four decades ago. “We have better warning systems in place and we’re better at forecasting for 2022, so we’re better able to prepare people for what’s coming next,” says Professor Cloke. “Certainly, one would hope that you would avoid the number of deaths associated with 1976.” But, he says, none of us should underestimate the foreboding of our increasingly hot summers. That such heatwaves are happening more often – 2003, 2006, 2018 and 2020 all saw prolonged periods of intense heat – is climate change in action. That the 1976 record temperature has been broken repeatedly in the intervening years – most recently in 2019, when a high of 38.7 was recorded in Cambridge – is a downright ominous phenomenon. “As climate change continues, this will become more extreme,” he says. “Hot weather on one side and floods on the other. and we are not a country with the infrastructure to deal with 40C temperatures happening regularly or for days at a time. Once we start seeing summers where that’s not unusual, you’re talking about disruption and droughts on a scale we’ve never seen before.”
