As the sweat soaks through your clothing on your Northern Line commute, you would be forgiven for believing that you had been mystically transported to the unrelenting heat of Marrakech. But it’s actually hotter in London right now.
The same is true compared to Islamabad, Havana and possibly quite soon, Cairo. This week, the Met Office issued a warning that temperatures might reach up to 40˚C in parts of Britain; heat we are far from ready for. In other cities around the world, infrastructure and labour laws are designed to keep their populations safe and cool. Domestically, we are stuck in old buildings designed to insulate, and workers kept there by insufficient legislation. Caught beneath British bureaucracy and a fetish for heritage, there is no remedy to the extreme heat waves that are becoming an annual occurrence.
The case for air conditioning in Britain is plagued by hypocrisy and debates on conservation: to nullify the ever-increasing heat, one must contribute more to its root cause. Beyond the environmental concerns, architectural purists denounce the modernisation of buildings ‘listed’ for their historical importance.
This week, El Paso is being warned of temperatures “ranging between 102 and 107 degrees“, or 38.9˚C and 41.7˚C for those on the right side of the Atlantic. While dealing with the same temperatures, El Paso operates cooling centres, such as public libraries, so that the public have instantly accessible places to cool down if caught in the heat. Although unsuitable for British, humid heat, El Paso also employs a style of air conditioning called ‘swamp cooling’ that is both cheaper to install and more environmentally friendly. It relies on using a fan and water reservoir to blow damp, cool air into a room. As we cower away from the sun this summer, is it finally time for both institutional and infrastructural reform?
It is difficult to conceptualise this heat without feeling guilt and anger about the climate. More difficult still to explain the current heatwave without accepting that it is our responsibility. Don’t look to politicians for a solution to any of this.While Nigel Farage and Reform UK may not outwardly denounce climate change as a hoax, the pledge to “Scrap Net Zero and Related Subsidies” surely speaks for itself. Reform’s last general election manifesto reads: “We are better to adapt to warming, rather than pretend we can stop it.”
But the risks that a heat wave poses are not trivial. Almost four years ago for this paper, Richard Seymour expressed the fatal reality of these synthetic catastrophes. Now here we are again. Extreme heat waves really are the new normal. But they shouldn’t be normalised, argue Bob Ward and Emma Howard Boyd of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE. Boyd wrote in a press release: “This week’s extreme temperatures risk losses to the economy of hundreds of millions of pounds due to lower productivity and infrastructure failures. More concerningly it will cause the deaths of hundreds of people across the country. This is not normal.”
Unlike in other European countries more accustomed to the heat, schools and workplaces in Britain do not have a legal temperature maximum. Instead, employers are only encouraged to keep temperatures at a “comfortable level” (Health and Safety Executive). In Spain, (also cooler than Britain this week) the maximum temperature allowed for ‘sedentary’ office work is 27C. The result is a lack of productivity and consequent economic suffering. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 1999, former prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, credits air conditioning as the single most influential innovation for his nation. It is what made civil engineering possible. Singapore, in some respects, is arguably a more developed nation than Britain today as a result.
Nobody is proposing to tear down the Tower of London or Big Ben to build a giant fan powered by hydroelectricity from the Thames. Solutions to a warming climate do not have to be fantastical. Normal homes with rooftop solar panels can power the equivalent of five hours per day of air conditioning during this heat wave. Even non-listed buildings that are simply just outdated are suffering. Built to retain heat rather than lose it, personal homes are boiling over and parents are buying aircons for schools to keep their children cool.
The rejection of air conditioning units in listed buildings is considerably more prevalent due to the necessary consultation with a Listed Building Consent (LBC) “conservation officer”, many of whom reportedly reject requests on the grounds of inefficient design or excess noise. Supposedly, the conservation carried out by these LBC officers is twofold, conserving the climate while conserving architecture unfit for the 21st century. The implementation of air conditioning relies on environmental progress like cleaner energy. Without it, we make the problem worse.
This modernisation of infrastructure is crucial. If not just for quality of life, but also for economic growth. There is a reason Spain is one of the fastest growing European economies, and it is not just down to siestas. If we want to escape, we may need to adopt some of their principles.
[Further reading: Welcome to the inferno]
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Subscribe here to commentVictorian terraces cope a lot better with extreme temperatures than more modern structures (she says, having lived in both). Sash windows provide essential ventilation, for a start.