Britain needs the Med mindset

Britain is a hot country now. How many years of “once in a generation heat waves” do we have to have in a row before they become a normal British summer? You can find news articles and earnest Met Office reports about unprecedented temperatures going back every summer for over a decade. At a certain point, you have to stop coping and accept reality: Britain is a hot country.

There is a sense, one I’m not altogether unsympathetic to, that this is unnatural, un-British, unwelcome. Climate change has shifted us from a country of Dickensian snowy winters and cheerfully rain-ruined summer holidays (spent eating crisps in the rain in the back of your dad’s car as test match special plays on the radio), to the summer of the YooKay. The YooKay summer is full of sweaty shorts-wearing Deanos, sodcasting youths on juddering busses, bodies baking on beaches, and fat tattooed crowds packed into the narrow pavements of surly, threatening, too-hot high streets full of vape shops, turkish barbers and fried chicken dispensaries. 

At a certain point we are going to have to adapt, and accept that “heat waves” are now predictable yearly weather events

There is a certain school of thought, popular amongst aging leftists, that sees the weather as our national penance for the sin of carbon emissions. No adjustment should be made, no air con installed — we have made our sweltering bed and now must lie in it, even if it kills some of us. Whilst man-made climate change is almost certainly the cause of Europe’s yearly incineration, it’s far from clear what our elderly continent can do about it. We’ve gone further than anywhere else in carving back emissions, with the entire EU only producing 6 per cent of global carbon, and Britain itself accounting for less than 1 per cent. We are way behind the belching fumes of America, India and China, who together account for nearly half of worldwide CO2. Even if the world were to become carbon neutral tomorrow, higher temperatures would be here to stay until carbon was sequestered (or short of some ambitious geoengineering). 

That leaves Britain with a scalding hot dose of reality to swallow. We cannot have water shortages, power failures, rail delays and heat deaths every time the weather climbs north of 30 degrees celsius. At a certain point we are going to have to adapt, and accept that “heat waves” are now predictable yearly weather events. There are obvious, competence-based adjustments involved when it comes to building resilient infrastructure, but also deeper questions about what kind of country we want to be, and what sort of lives we wish to live. 

If the aging lefty is eager for us all to slowly boil to death for our crimes against the planet, there is another species of political animal just as secretly excited about rising temperatures: the Yankee-loving, yes-in-my-back-yard, libertarian wonk. For years, Britain has been a genteel country of Victorianesque window-openers and cosy terraced housing-dwellers, smugly temperate hobbits standing in aloof contempt of the mosquito screened, 24-hours-a-day air conditioned, drive-everywhere American suburbanite. Much to the delight of neoliberal wonks, global warming is a chance for all of us to live in America (coca-cola, wonderbra etc.) 

The American answer to heat is to cheerfully stomp all over it. Water is pumped in its millions of gallons to produce lawns and golf courses in the middle of the desert. Cities like Houston are allowed to sprawl freely, meaning detached houses can merrily pump heat out to their heart’s content. Vast baking freeways are a matter of indifference to a city built around airconditioned cars. Walking is replaced by the hobbyism of “hiking”, and shopping is frequently done in, you guessed it, air-conditioned malls. 

This is one way to “solve” the problem of rising temperatures. But it is not the costless trade-off it seems. As well as pushing up energy consumption, and thus bills and emissions, air conditioning transfers heat outside of houses, and into the streets of dense British cities. During the hottest periods, air conditioning can push up temperatures by as much as two degrees celsius. Combined with poorly designed cities, this can contribute to an urban heat island effect that can see urban areas become as much as ten degrees hotter. There is a danger that we design cities, as America has, that destroy walkability and civic life. 

If Britain is now experiencing Mediterranean climates, we should also be learning from Mediterranean urbanism

Human beings have been designing cool, livable cities in consistently or intermittently hot climates for thousands of years, long before air conditioning or cars. The engineering and design principles involved are older than the industrial revolution, older than the existence of the English nation or people. You can find relief from the heat as you walk around the remains of cool marble agoras and amphitheaters across the Mediterranean, and that’s without the benefits of the fountains and awnings that once adorned these ancient cities. Yet despite the existence of primordially proven techniques and the sure knowledge of rising temperatures, British newbuilds are still designed to retain heat in all seasons, warming us in the winter and baking us in the summer. A combination of poorly designed environmental and health and safety regulations, and the rationing of space in a pinched housing market, has produced lethal heat traps. From windows that don’t open all the way, to boxy construction and low ceilings, this is one problem we can’t blame on Victorian architects — we’re doing this to ourselves.

If Britain is now experiencing Mediterranean climates, we should also be learning from Mediterranean urbanism. That means high ceilings, narrow shady streets, covered walkways, cooler stone and marble, more trees and gardens, and making use of water, from spraying the pavements in the morning to urban fountains. Far from an alien imposition, this could be a return to aesthetic tradition, as we learn to reembrace neoclassical architecture, Georgian townhouses, Victorian parks, and Edwardian mansion blocks. 

It needn’t be an either/or when it comes to giving everyone the option of air conditioning (and with rising heat deaths, vulnerable people should be actively encouraged and helped to install it), simply a question of moderation and moneysaving alternatives. Better architectural design and urban planning reduces the need for air con, and mitigates its heat polluting effects when it is needed. Swapping cars for trams, and pedestrianising streets, also lets us plant more trees, reducing and soaking up pollution, providing shade, and creating corridors of cool that allow civic life to continue even on the hottest days. 

Another factor holding back civic life and rendering summers miserable is the British war on nightlife and outdoors entertainment — a reality nowhere more evident than in the nation’s capital. Pubs close at 10 and 11. The tube stops running at midnight. Outdoor seating for long evening conversations is refused in favour of the sweaty sprawl of salarymen standing outside City pubs, roaring away inanely for a snatched hour before running for their trains. Shops are open all day for the unemployed to gaup at during working hours, on the fond ancestral assumption that 1950s housewives will shop in them, and promptly close as the city’s employed population leaves work, forcing shoppers to navigate the hideous hordes packed into London’s inevitably un-pedestrianised shopping streets during the weekend. 

If how we construct space is one half of the equation, how we behave and organise our time is the other. In the nation’s offices, the average employee, far from enjoying a leisurely lunch in a cafe or leafy park, frantically stuffs unhealthy snacks into their mouth as they are chained to their laptops, caught in the sisyphean purgatory of presenteeism. Social media and shopping will swallow hours of working time, but no breaks will be taken and nobody will leave on the dot of 5. No wonder many prefer to work from home, where they can waste their time pretending to work in domestic comfort, further withdrawing life and activity from city centres. British working habits have, along with a related obsession with low-quality, fash-fashion e-commerce, helped decimate the high street and the hospitality sector. None of this post industrial, performative protestant work ethic has done anything to push up British productivity, which has lagged behind Europe since the 1960s, as we work longer hours for worse results. 

If more of us lived centrally, working and raising families in well designed, sociable towns and cities, the trade-offs between work and home, and the pollution and stress of the commute could be cast off. Cities like Athens and Florence flourished because brilliant minds and skilled craftsmen lived in close proximity, and had the leisure and shared space to build a common culture. Britain’s own industrial revolution benefited from the fusion of arts, culture and industry embodied by figures like Brunel, who put their engineering genius at the service of burgeoning, creative cities, and worked with architects like Matthew Digby Wyatt to make infrastructure projects into civic monuments. 

With vineyards springing up across the south coast, it’s about time we updated our cities and habits to match, and embraced the Med mindset. Yet as we slip the surly bonds of the north and submerge ourselves in Mediterranean light, can we ever hope for the return of the British birthright of temperate weather? British genius might one day use atmosphere coolants or bioengineered algae to put an end to the long Egyptian night of climate change, and usher in the glorious Anglo dawn of brisk, no-nonsense weather. Even if that happy day should come, we certainly won’t regret having bequeathed our descendents a legacy of shaded streets, elegant villas and refined urbanism.