The Great Heatwave 50 years on – Heatwaves and our changing climate
- Diana Rogers
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Written by Diana Rogers August 2026
Ever since I remember, the summer of 1976 has been talked about. As a child, adults would regularly refer to the ‘Summer of 1976’ and I used to wonder what that heat must have felt like. My husband remembers a playground that was melting and stuck to his shoes. My mother remembers insufferable heat. Photographs show standpipes, brown fields, dried river basins… and it had been widely talked about as a ‘once in a lifetime’ heatwave, ‘The Great Heatwave’ - embedded in the national psyche as such.
Throughout my childhood summers, 24 or 25 degrees would seem hot, mostly they seemed to languish around 21 or 22 degrees. Our annual holiday in North Devon was generally cooled with light “mizzle” or was a downright washout. There were “good” summers, when I remember basking and more likely than not, accidently burning. When “back in the day” suncream was available in a wide array of single digits. Never enough protection for young skin. As children, I remember the slow realisation around bedtime, that the day on the beach in late April or early May, (which had seemed so benign, cool and breezy) had completely masked the sun’s power. Hot legs or shoulders, now too painful to lie down on. But summers were never, ever, like the ‘Great Heatwave of 1976’. Maybe that summer was such a strong feature of my own childhood mind, as it was the summer my mother was pregnant with me and had told me so often about. It was of course not my fault that I happened to have been due in August of that year. By all accounts my father was fully supportive and rose to the occasion by buying fans for the house – a classic Victorian terrace. Generally cool, drafty houses and originally designed and built in the days when central heating was not a feature of the average home. Once warmed up, these houses radiate the heat and depend on nighttime open windows to purge and cool down, using the relatively cooler air of the night to draw out the heat. This method, however, is not particularly effective during “tropical nights”, when night-time temperatures stay above 20 degrees. Tropical nights used to be rare. In the 30 years between 1961 and 1990 there had been 44 tropical nights, most of them associated with the 1976 drought and the hot summer of 1983. But from 1991 to 11 August 2020, 84 such nights were recorded, with 21 of them occurring since 2008. In fact, five nights that stayed above 20 °C were recorded in 2018, four in 2019, six in 2020 and during the 2022 heatwave, 10 were recorded. This summer The Met Office has already described 2026 has having “frequent tropical nights”. By 2018 the Met Office had begun tracking the number of ‘tropical nights’ as one of its measures in an acknowledgement that they are “expecting it to become more prevalent in the future due to our changing climate. So, what does this mean for our built environment, which has been designed for a temperate climate? The night purge method needs a daytime to night-time temperature differentiation to be effective and many homes are built in places where it is not possible to sleep with open windows, due to noise, but don’t have access to mechanical cooling. During this summer, we are already on our fifth heatwave. The Met Office announced yesterday that this is likely to be the warmest summer on record. Night-time temperatures are staying high. Britian’s built environment was never designed for sustained periods of extreme heat nor for such warm nights. This is a major issue which now urgently needs addressing.
As I grew up, I was lucky enough to live on the coast, although in my opinion it was a boring coastline and I hankered after the cliffs of North Devon where we holidayed. As such, we did not go abroad and the first time I went on a commercial flight, I was 18 and going off to work on a boat in the Mediterranean. For me it was the first time I had experienced day-after-day, constant sun. And that Mediterranean sun was also the first time I had experienced dangerous heat and managed to give myself heatstroke. I had been given a task of cleaning all the brass on the deck of the beautiful Edwardian motor yacht “Kalizma” (famed for being the location where Richard Burton proposed to Elizabeth Taylor) which took hours, in the hot sun. After three months in the Med, I was offered a job on a boat in the Indian Ocean. I declined.. mostly because I missed home. And what I recall most tangibly, was missing green (and oddly, I thought at the time), missing the British rain. The memory of flying back to the UK after three months in Mallorca will never leave me. Watching out of a plane window, as we flew over Spain, then France and then over the English Channel - as we flew through clouds, I was struck by how green everything seemed. I was back home and it was raining. It was July 1995. But if I had carried out that same flight home this summer - or in the recent summer of 2022 – it would have looked very different – not green at all.
The grass is yellow and brown. It will go green again, of course. But this is only the beginning - what will it look like in another 10, 15, 20 years – in another 50 years? In 2076! I have horses kept outside on grass for 8 years now but only in the last 4 years, we have had to feed hay in either the spring or the summer, or even both. Currently there’s no grass growing at all. It is dangerous to walk dogs between 8am-8pm because the road surfaces are so hot and dogs are also particularly at risk of overheating. It is still arguably too hot to walk them at 9pm at times. The field behind our house caught fire recently. The contractors were hay-making - not in the day-time, but in the late evening. Still a spark struck from a flint as the equipment passed over it was enough to ignite a sizable area, requiring a number of fire engines to put it out. The harvest this year has been over a month early and in our part of Hampshire, the combine harvesters have been working throughout the night to reduce the fire risk. The NFU and some MP’s are calling for retailers to ban the sales of disposable BBQs. By 10th August this year, over 23,359 ha (57,720 acres; 90.19 sq mi; 233.59 km2) have been burnt, with 72 fires larger than 30 ha (74 acres) being recorded. In the UNEP 2022 Frontiers report, titled Noise, Blazes and Mismatches – in chapters 2 and 3 - wildfires, climate change and nature depletion are highlighted as key emerging major environmental issues. Interestingly, noise was highlighted in chapter 1 of this report.
The ecological and human health effects of heatwaves are substantial. For people - impacts include excess deaths, economic effects and threats to our food and water security. The 2026 harvest has suffered - yields are down, which will have the effect of driving food prices up. This happened after the drought of 1976 when food prices went up by 12%. In urban areas, buildings and infrastructure designed and built for the temperate British climate have been sweltering in sustained high temperatures. It’s the summer holidays now, but throughout the last half-term at school, our children had quickly cobbled together heat “plans” in place, wearing PE uniforms, being sent back from school early – or schools being closed altogether. The Wildlife Trusts state that “Climate Change is one of the greatest threats to nature.”
What is frustrating, is that we have so many of the solutions already. And we have had them for years, when limiting the warming to 1.5 degrees (which was already locked in) was still achievable. And I remember working at WWF in 2010 when the new coalition government had created a policy framework that, had it been nurtured, would have transformed the microgeneration renewable electricity market at a much faster pace. This could have driven down the price of electricity and further improved UK energy security by now. A whole new industry was flourishing rapidly, with new jobs, new skills and new businesses being created in the UK micro-generation solar industry, courtesy of the new ‘feed-in tariffs’. But up-take was fast out-stripping the allocated budget, so feed-in prices were reduced, damping down the up-take. But with the benefit of hindsight, how could we afford not to have done this, compared with the long-term costs we are facing from climate change.
The scientific data and evidence base for the climate and nature crisis is overwhelmingly clear. And we also know this is not an engineering challenge beyond our capabilities - we have many of the solutions. We, like many other engineering consultancies, are ready to deploy these across the built environment. Take heat pumps for starters - as a company we have been working hard in the background advising policymakers and government in various ways. We have been involved in the creation of new noise guidance which have just been published for heat pumps in the UK, enabling the Heat Pump industry to get on with rapid deployment. Installers now have a noise risk-based framework, to give homeowners confidence that heat pump installations will be fitted with the acoustic context in mind. We urgently need to focus on decarbonising our domestic heating and what is so good about Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) air-to-air technology is that they also enable electrically driven cooling systems in the summer months. This is a win-win opportunity for the UK, so we must not let it flounder.
Today, we are all looking to our new Prime Minster, Andy Burham - to be bold and holistic. Sustainability is not a choice and it is not an add-on, it must be fully integrated within every policy. After all, it must be obvious by now that it’s not about “saving nature”? Nature will flourish given time. Humanity may not be so lucky.
I found this short film the other day and really liked its clarity describing the inter-play between our weather – our extreme weather events and the overall influence of climate change. Watch it here. The analogy is this: our weather is made up of blue playing cards and red playing cards. The red playing cards denoting warm events and the blue cards denoting cold weather events. As our climate changes, more of the blue cards are being removed so the frequency of the red cards – the warmer weather – is increasing. So it follows that for every year, every parliament, that we don’t embrace the pace of change we need to tackle the climate crisis - we are seeing more and more of the blue cards taken away. To me, this so clearly explains why the ‘summer of 1976’ heatwave and drought ceases to be a once-in-a-lifetime event. Like ‘The Climate Stripes’, created by Professor Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading in 2018 which show clearly and vividly how global average temperatures have risen over nearly two centuries, the “blue and red playing cards climate analogy”, to me, is both clear and compelling. Climate communication tools such as these enable people to have their own personal response, allowing people to think and reflect, supporting the psychological space people may need to consider what action they want to take.
Which brings me back to my own journey. I have reached half a century. Time is going much quicker than I ever thought it could. I had wanted to do something that made a difference, but so far, I am not really sure that I have. Not enough really. I have always worked from the place of solutions, and I believe in people coming together to co-create the change we need. To me, the issues are too complex and nested, to take a single line approach. The answers lie in changing the systems, enabling new technologies and ushering in the “new green economy”. I believe that people need hope. And most of all, we should not make our children feel that this is a mess they will be left with to sort out. As I begin my 50’s, I want to show my children – and new generations - that we truly are doing everything we can to make lasting positive change.
Sources and background reading
