‘A sardine can in the Sahara’: In London, the heat is on

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London: My journey on a London red bus was turning me into a Sunday roast. And it was only Tuesday. There was no glamour on this trip to Westminster on the first few days of a new job, and not just because the double-decker did not have the old open stairs at the back to let you hop nonchalantly onto the rear platform, like they once did in the movies.

There’s no point asking the driver to turn up the air-con on a London bus – there isn’t any.Credit: iStock

No, there was no glamour at all. This bus was a sardine can in the Sahara. It had been baking all day on scorched streets under an unremitting sun. And the passengers were dripping sweat onto the floor while hot air blasted through the open windows, because London buses are not made for 32-degree heat.

Not that anyone was complaining. My fellow passengers stared at their phones without a murmur as the bus jolted at the traffic lights and percolated the body odour. What else could they do? They could hardly ask the driver to crank up the cooling – there was none.

The fan in my bus made a lot of noise but could not cool a thing. And that is no surprise when London temperatures just keep rising.

I know this is no tragedy for me, even if I did feel like King John. “There is so hot a summer in my bosom that all my bowels crumble up to dust,” he cried. Shakespeare was describing a poisoning, not a heatwave, but his words felt right to me.

I have no grounds to complain. I’ve moved from Canberra to London after 20 years of covering federal politics so I can take up the post of Europe correspondent, replacing the inimitable Rob Harris. I left Canberra reluctantly, and I will return there, but the chance to embark on a new adventure was irresistible. I’ve been seeking to report more from Europe since a visit in 2022 when I hitched a ride into Ukraine and saw what the war was doing to the world.

Reporting from Europe feels more important than ever. I recall watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on television and wishing I was there. That footage showed a moment of exultation; now there is a sense of exhaustion. Europe is troubled by war, economic malaise and domestic discontent. Whatever happens next, it needs to be reported.

Climate change is one of the stories. The discomfort in a London bus is only worth mentioning because it is a small part of a big shift. The Met Office, the UK government’s meteorological agency, says the past three years have been among the country’s five warmest on record. Parts of England are in drought.

The Royal Meteorological Society has just found that the United Kingdom has warmed about 0.25 degrees Celsius each decade since the 1980s. It says recent warming has exceeded any temperatures observed in central England in 300 years.

Londoners are having to adapt to increasingly hot summers.Credit: Getty Images

Now there is a much sharper focus on heat as a silent killer. Scientists at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine worked with colleagues at Imperial College London to examine historical records and compare them to the heatwave across Europe from June 23 to July 2 this year.

Their conclusion? About 2300 people may have died as a result of the extreme temperatures across 12 major cities. This included 263 deaths in London.

So London has to brace for the heat. At the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a few stops on the line from where I live, the curator of living collections, Simon Toomer, says they are changing the way they garden to conserve water and save plants.

When I ask about adapting to hotter summers, he mentions choosing different species. “Plants from warmer, drier areas of the world with climates similar to Kew’s future conditions are being collected and planted to replace failing species,” he says. As the climate changes, so will the plants at Kew.

There are some intractable debates ahead – and not just about climate targets. Britain is so unready for the heat that some people want the country to accept air-conditioning as a solution. London is full of Victorian housing fitted with radiators for winter and nothing for summer, because summers used to be milder.

Air con is intensely resisted by those who believe it will only add to electricity use and carbon emissions. The advocates, however, say solar and wind power will make it viable and ethical. You can tell the argument will only intensify with every heatwave.

It rained last night, finally. But here are words I never thought I’d write in England: it did not rain enough. Parts of London are so parched they look familiar to me. The grass on the nearby football field is as brown and crunchy as a Canberra oval at Christmas. The Thames near Brentford would be a comforting sight for anyone homesick for Lake Burley Griffin, with its weeds and muddy water.

Not that I’m homesick for the lake. There is just too much to do.

A final note. If you were a reader when I was covering federal politics in Canberra, thank you. I meant to write a final column to say farewell, but ran out of time while packing up the house. If you are a new reader now that I am in the World pages, welcome aboard – it will be a fascinating ride. But let’s not take the bus just yet.

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