Britain is already a hot country. It should act like it – The Economist – 03.07.25

A land of long holidays, cool homes and tree-lined streets awaits.

Stepping off the 9.10 from London Victoria to Whitstable was akin to disembarking from a Ryanair flight in Alicante rather than a former oyster port in Kent. A little before midday, the temperature was creeping towards 30°C. As a wall of heat hit her face, one pensioner despaired: “It’s unBritish.”

Increasingly, it is nothing of the sort. Summer days of 30°C are now common in southern England. Occasionally the heat is extreme. Britain hit 40°C for the first time in 2022. In some scenarios, it could hit 45°C, according to the Met Office. Britain is becoming hotter. Each summer brings an annual farce, in which an increasingly hot country pretends it is anything but.

Britain’s image of summer has not caught up with its sweaty reality. To Britons, summer is still a season for suffering, stoically, in the rain. Glastonbury, a music festival which kicked off on June 25th, is still written about as a mudfest even though sunstroke has been a far bigger risk than trench foot for years. Wimbledon is portrayed as a rain-addled fortnight, rather than a tournament that has had to introduce ten-minute breaks for players when temperatures reach 30.1°C.

Pretending Britain is still a cool country leads to strange policy. Adapting to the heat is often illegal. Strict planning laws limit how shops can install awnings. Building regulations limit air-conditioning in new homes. This leads to the ridiculous summer spectacle of a plastic nozzle of an ac unit poking haphazardly out of the window of a well-insulated £600,000 ($822,000) new-build flat. Parts of the media, particularly hand-wringing writers at the Guardian, paint air-conditioning as an absurd luxury. It is English exceptionalism for earnest liberals. Other hot countries rely on air-conditioning to survive the summer. Why is Britain special?

If there is a conspiracy against air-conditioning in Britain, it goes right to the top. The government offers subsidies worth £7,500 to people replacing a gas boiler with an electric heat pump, but only if it produces solely heat. A system that can heat in winter and cool in summer receives nothing. Mercifully, Labour is considering extending the subsidies, yet that is not guaranteed to happen. A puritanical streak in British policymaking runs deep. Only the most banal conspiracies turn out to be true: the Deep State exists and it tries to keep you warm on summer nights.

Summer denial means that serious problems caused by heat are dealt with in silly ways. Britain is now a country that suffers from regular drought, particularly in its south-east. Yet the politics of water are almost solely the politics of poo, with Britain’s growing band of wild swimmers annoyed that the country’s waters endure sewage spills after heavy rain. Sewage has been mentioned over 2,000 times in Parliament since 2020. “Water security”? A mere 41, or one fewer mention than for “wild swimming”. Some concerns are heeded by Britons when asked about the climate. Animal suffering comes top, according to More In Common, a pollster. Forget the Englishmen, what about the mad dogs?

Ignoring the heat leads to odd working patterns. When the summer heat arrives, the French leave their humid cities, much of the country shutting down for all of August. Britons stay put, trying to work through what was once a temperate season, engaging in an unproductive waltz of out-of-office emails. Should Britons learn to enjoy their long, hot summers, it would become a boomtime for domestic tourism. Why travel to continental Europe when its former climate has arrived here?

Unfortunately, while mitigating the effects of hotter summers is often banned, so is reaping the benefits. In England, local authorities are not allowed to levy tourist taxes. A change in climate has led to a boom in English wine. Yet vineyards are sometimes banned from expanding on their own land. Restrictive planning laws stop developers turning places such as Whitstable into the Costa del Kent; the fact that councils retain so few taxes locally gives them little incentive. The result? A dearth of accommodation makes domestic tourism expensive. In Whitstable, a night in a fishing hut—a glorified shed—can cost £375. The housing crisis attracts much comment; the hotel crisis less so.

Ensuring Britain’s summers are pleasant will fall on councils. But they do not always have the cash to turn exposed roads into shady tree-lined streets or transform high streets with tasteful awnings. Almost every problem in Britain—from the state of the nhs to Britain’s knackered public realm—can be dragged back to its underfunded and underpowered local councils, the only part of the state that voters interact with most days. The increasingly warm British summer is no exception.

Nozzle Britain

All sides of politics are tempted to ignore the reality of Britain’s summers. For the right, nostalgia clouds people’s thinking. Was it not roasting in 1976, when a heatwave turned the country feral? Rose-tinted memories of long, hot summers past clash with the realities of longer, hotter ones today. For the left, it is an inconvenient truth that Britain will in summer suffer less than close European neighbours, never mind people at the equator. The idea that climate change can, with effort, lead to a more pleasant summer—of tree-lined avenues, cool homes and long holidays pootling around the countryside—is anathema to people for whom only suffering can lead to salvation.

Reality will sink in eventually. Until it does, expect to see the same old scenes on the Kent coast, as Britons gorge on the hot sun they still think of as an aberration rather than the norm. In Whitstable, a defeated beachgoer staggered past a pile of shucked oyster shells on an unshaded concrete path by the beach, her shoulders bright red: “I’m done with the sun.” The sun is not yet done with Britain.■

https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/07/03/britain-is-already-a-hot-country-it-should-act-like-it/

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Illustration: Nate Kitch