“Our ability to trust that our homes will keep us safe from the outside is under threat,” the geographer Sam Johnson-Schlee writes in Hot House, his recent book on how heat has transformed domestic life. This summer, high temperatures have become inescapable. People have coped with makeshift solutions: keeping curtains drawn, placing foil over windows or – for those who can afford one – plugging in an air-conditioning unit. Planning experts warn that, with only about half of councils requiring new buildings to include cooling strategies, many homes will become “death traps” as temperatures rise.
Britain’s homes weren’t built to cope with this. The country’s historically mild climate allowed developers to build houses without insulation, while industrialisation supplied plentiful coal to burn when temperatures dropped. Many homes are consequently drafty in winter and sweltering in summer. Unlike those in Mediterranean climates, British homes lack shutters and shaded communal spaces. While Ildefons Cerdà, Barcelona’s masterplanner, was designing housing blocks with cool courtyards and chamfered edges to allow breezes to flow, Britain’s Victorian builders were throwing up rows of terrace houses – many without cross-ventilation – and giving little thought to the movement of the sun.
A new approach is overdue. Insulation would help to keep properties cool, but schemes to encourage it have languished. The promising green homes grant, launched in 2020 as part of Boris Johnson’s pledge to “build back greener”, was the victim of a political culture that prized soundbites over meaningful policy. The scheme gave upfront vouchers to homeowners and landlords to upgrade their insulation, but collapsed after just six months, with the public accounts committee saying that it had been “set up to fail” owing to an impossible timetable and rushed design.
With no national strategy for dealing with oppressive heat, many homeowners have installed air conditioning. There are now twice the number of air-conditioned homes in Britain that there were three years ago. While this technology has a role to play, it should form part of a broader cooling strategy alongside less energy-intensive techniques. Adopted en masse, air conditioning raises the urban temperature by expelling hot air, making life even warmer for people without it.
A recent plan from the mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, sketches a welcome alternative. The capital is more affected by extreme temperatures than anywhere in Britain due to its distinct heat island effect. London’s heat-ready plan puts forward a collective response based on sensible measures that should serve as a roadmap for other cities, such as retrofitting homes with shutters, installing air conditioning in schools and other public buildings, planting more trees for shade, and providing more swimming spots where people can take a dip.
There is much to admire here. But Sir Sadiq’s plan collides with a political reality that poses severe challenges to adaptation. In a fiscal climate hostile to public investment, it will demand many billions of public money to deliver, particularly since such changes, its authors note, “do not always translate into clear financial savings or returns”. The new prime minister, Andy Burnham, has made much of his vision for a politics that is more attuned to place, but has so far remained quiet about the climate crisis. Its terrifying impact on the places where we live should make this threat an urgent priority.
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