It is Thursday the 17th and I have been told, by the Royal Observatory of all people, that summer has not finished. Six days left. They go by the equinox, not by the schools, and the equinox is next Wednesday in the small hours.
The Met Office had already made up its mind on the first of the month. Hottest summer on the books, and the books go back to 1884. The figure they gave was 16.5, and that is the average of everything, every day and every night from Shetland to Cornwall put through the same sum, so at first glance it reads like a nothing temperature. My kitchen is 16.5 in February. Getting a whole country to average that across June, July and August is a different matter.
The Met Office Figures For Summer 2026
Last year held the record at 16.1 and held it for twelve months. This year went past it by 0.4, and in a national seasonal mean 0.4 is a big step, the usual movement between records is a fraction of that.
June came in as the second warmest June they have. July, second warmest July. August would have been up there with them except the last week of it rained, the kind that gets into your shoes, and that pulled the month back. It still finished as the hottest summer.
England, Wales and Northern Ireland each broke their own summer record. Scotland came joint sixth.
Amy Doherty, who leads the climate information centre at the Met Office, said in the release that records like this are now being broken with increasing frequency.
1976 Is Now Seventh
Everyone I know over fifty measures heat against 1976. My dad still does it. Standpipes in the road, reservoirs down far enough that the drowned villages showed, and the ladybirds, there was a plague of them that year and they bit, which people who weren’t there never believe. That summer has been the yardstick for fifty years and it has just been moved down to seventh.
- 2026: 16.5°C
- 2025: 16.1°C
- 2018: 15.7°C
- 2006: 15.7°C
- 2003: 15.7°C
All five of those came after 2003. Three of them came in the last six years. 1976 didn’t get any cooler, obviously, but five summers have now come in above it and there is a sixth wedged in between as well.
May, June And August
It started in May. On the 26th Kew Gardens reached 35.1, and the old May record had been sitting there since 1922 at just under 33, so that one went by more than two degrees in a single afternoon.
Wimbledon opened in that heat. Parasols up in stands that have no shade in them, people fanning themselves with the order of play, and Sally Bolton, who runs the All England Club, said to the press on the first day:
“for us Brits here at the championships it feels very hot”
She was right. The Met Office has since written it down.
June had Lingwood, in Norfolk, at 38.0. Then the 13th of August was the day the year peaked, 38.1 at Kew. I remember the 13th because the Northern line was unusable and I walked from Euston and arrived at the office looking like I had swum there. By the end of it all of Wales was in drought, officially, and about half of England, and then the last week of August rained and everyone said it was typical.
What Got Worn
You could tell by July who had got the message and who was still in a jacket out of habit. The people who had got it were in cotton or linen, because air goes through those and doesn’t go through a heavy weave, and they had gone loose, wide trousers, shirts that hang off you rather than sit on you, and pale, because a dark shirt in that sun heats up and holds it. The overshirt came with you for the office, where the air con was set by someone who sits nowhere near a window, and it came off again in the lift on the way out.
The maxi dress won the summer, I’d say. You can wear it all day and not think about it once, it covers you, air gets under it, and Maxi dresses can move easily from a park in the afternoon to a pub garden in the evening if you change the shoes and put a different thing round your neck, and by the second heatwave you could see the whole country had worked that out too. The Red Cross has had a page up for years telling people to wear loose pale things and keep drinking water, it’s still there, and this was the year it stopped reading like advice for people going to Spain.
The lining is what catches people out. A dress can be cotton on the outside and lined in something that doesn’t breathe, and you find that out at two in the afternoon, not in the changing room.
The Houses
British houses are built to hold heat in and they don’t know it’s August. The government has a checklist for this, keep cool at home, and it reads as obvious right up until you are lying awake at one in the morning with the window shut. Curtains closed on the sunny side during the day. Windows open at night once the air outside is cooler than the air inside, which some nights was about eleven and some nights was never. Lights off, telly off, laptop shut, because each of those is a small heater in a room that can’t get rid of any of it.
01:06 On Wednesday
The Met Office had summer finished on the 31st of August. Astronomers don’t, they wait for the equinox, which the Royal Observatory puts at 01:06 on Wednesday the 23rd, British Summer Time. After that the sun is south of the equator and the nights start winning by a few minutes a day. So the hottest summer this country has ever recorded ends, by the strict count, at six minutes past one on Wednesday morning, and most of us will be asleep for it.