During heatwaves, Britain just isn’t set up for extreme temperatures
I live in England, and I was just in Italy. Both countries are getting a heat wave next week, with Italian temperatures hitting over 40°C, and English temperatures surpassing 30°C.
My Italian trip this summer was a little spur-of-the-moment. I hadn’t been anywhere internationally for months; my favourite band was on tour; I wanted a solo trip. The stars (and my savings!) aligned and I got to go, but there were still concerns on my part.
Mainly, I worried about the heat.
I’ve written before about not being able to handle the heat; years ago, in Portugal, I dismissed a local friend’s well-intentioned warning that the Portuguese sun was “different”. What ended up happening next was heat exhaustion—I spent a day and a half of my 6-day trip asleep, sunburnt and dehydrated.
For most illnesses, recovery is simple: you get sick. You rest, you drink fluids. Your body repairs itself. You move on.
But the heat exhaustion—or heat stroke, some would call it—had a deeper impact on me. The fact that I was walking around, feeling fine, a little tired, a little hot….and then suddenly was too shaky to walk, too tired to go to dinner, and felt nauseated to the point of vomiting really put the fear of god in me.
Now, whenever we hit super-high temperatures, I get anxious. I do everything I can to calm myself, like journaling, breathing exercises, cancelling plans, and adequately preparing for the heat through cooling the apartment and hydrating regularly. But my body remembers what my conscious mind would like to forget: losing control of your body suddenly is really scary.
So when I thought about going to Italy—where the heat for the week was, on average, 36°C—I took a really mature, measured approach.
I decided that I was going to pretend I didn’t know that fact, and not get anxious about it.
Okay, okay—this is neither measured, nor mature. It’s not even based in reality. I just knew that if I thought too much about it, I was going to freak out. So I decided not to. I confirmed that my hotel had air conditioning, and vowed to think about other things.
But throughout my time in Florence, I realized something—although the temperature was higher than London, it was bearable. Much, much more bearable at 37°C than England is at 30°C, which surprised me. I started asking myself—why does London feel hotter than other hotter European destinations? It doesn’t really make sense—but I credit the following reasons as to why:
England’s humidity is off-the-charts
In London, when the heat settles in, it feels heavy. The days are bright and hot, and all the moisture in the air makes it unbearable. In Florence, the dry heat mixed with occasional breezes made a pleasant atmosphere. In London, there are days where the air feels so thick and so still, I’m desperate to feel a breeze. Even when the sun sets, or before it rises, the air still has the same amount of moisture in it. This is super unpleasant. It also makes it harder to cool down naturally. With moisture-heavy air, it’s harder for sweat to evaporate (which is how your body cools itself). In Florence, I didn’t have this problem, despite it being 10°C higher temperature than what I was used to.
The infrastructure isn’t built for it.
Italy’s heat has been built into their infrastructure. I’m not just talking about air conditioning (although that was a godsend). I’m thinking about the clean water that comes from the fountains and outdoor taps, the close-together city streets that provide shade, and the parks and trees whose agriculture lowers the temperature of the city.
London is built differently. The hundred-year-old houses were built with the purpose of trapping heat, not letting it out. The London Underground (metro) system isn’t designed with mechanisms to allow cool air in. (You wouldn’t want this anyway. The air quality in the underground is so bad that an hour commuting a day is said to have the same impact on patron’s lungs as a pack of cigarettes per week.). And the idea that there would be air conditioning anywhere is laughable. Why build infrastructure that will only be needed one-sixth of the year?
The “breaks” we get in England from extreme heat just…don’t come.
Yes, Italy was extremely hot. But whenever it felt like too much to bear, I would pop into a shop, or get on the tram, or stop somewhere for a coffee. Everywhere in Florence, the possibility of air conditioning was built into the structures, as was the access to water and shade. This meant it was really easy to take breaks from extreme heat, and I think that more than anything meant that I could stay calm. If I got anxious, it’s like I had a pressure-release mechanism.
In London, that’s not what happens. You walk around hot; you come home, hot; you can open all the windows (and get ready for bugs, because screened windows aren’t common), and get a cool breeze, but on the whole, you’re still hot. Unless you have AC or a fan, there just isn’t a break for most people. And that can really send someone’s nervous system into overdrive; not the fact that something bad is happening, but that it will continue to happen and you’ll just have to deal with it until the weather changes.
If you’re someone who has trouble with heatwaves while travelling, you might find the pieces I’ve written about my experiences helpful:
9 Things That Will Make You Feel Less Anxious During a Heatwave
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