Cologne, courtyards, and more clothes: How I would guide Britain through a heatwave

It’s hot, no? As journalists reach for words untouched at other times of year – soaring, blistering, searing etc. – we all react like children to the weather being very sunny and very warm. We associate hot weather with holidays, so there’s an unmistakable excitement about the prospect of sandals and sunhats and floaty cotton dresses. Inside, we’re mentally carrying a bucket and spade and thinking ice-cream for tea. And there’s the usual jeering at other countries for being less hot than here. Posh and Becks in Ibiza? Pah! It’s hotter in Kew Gardens.

The last time it was around this temperature for Whit Weekend, it was 32.8 degrees in 1940, which must have made the situation in Dunkirk that bit more disagreeable. But now we’re contemplating this as the permanent condition of England: blistering, scorching, searing summers.

If this indeed the case, we’re going to have to change our ways, and we could start by looking to actually hot countries, where hot weather is the norm, for guidance. So here are some suggestions, large and small, for living with heat.

As the saying goes, only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun; we shouldn’t.

In really hot places they wear layers of natural fabric rather than in the British fashion, as little as possible. Yesterday in the crowds at Reading station (the train from the west country unexpectedly decanted all the passengers) I found myself staring at the angry, red, naked shoulders of pale women after one day of heatwave. Cover up!

In places like Spain supermarkets to sell industrial quantities of cheap, citrussy cologne, which you douse yourself and your clothes with for instant uplift. To get through the heatwave buy a giant bottle of 4711 and keep it in the fridge.

In hot countries people start the day early before the sun gets too hot. Children go to school at 7.30am and shops open by 8am. So, from the middle of May to the start of September, why not start the working day an hour earlier – at, say, 8am rather than 9am? Same would go for shops and schools. The Spanish siesta, an opportunity for a long lunch and closed shops, doesn’t work here, where so many people work far from home, but an early start would make it possible to leave work earlier, and be home for the cool of the evening.

Think Victorian: the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association in 1859 installed drinking water fountains around London for men and beasts; we could do with lots more of those, even if we shy away from the communal cups on chains they used to have. It beats buying water in bottles.

Countries in the Near and Middle East have stratagems for capturing coolness. Think dark inner courtyards in buildings, where the warm air has room to rise, with plants (decorative palms, say) and fountains. In Dickensian London similarly, courtyards were standard elements of public space. Even now, the coolest places in London, in both senses, are those City churchyards with places to sit in the shade of the adjoining church, with shelter from the sun and dappled shade among the plants. There’s a lovely one belonging to the little church of St Vedast, which is a haven in the summer.

If you want a lesson in how it’s done, make for the newly renovated Arab Hall in Leighton House in Kensington, where that eminent Victorian, Lord Leighton, recreated some of the features of the buildings he visited in the Levant, notably Turkish decorative tiles. If you want the full Ottoman effect, we could adopt the wooden lattice screens that allow filtered sunlight to enter rooms, while keeping out the blaze.

As anyone knows who has visited castles, thick walls are brilliant for excluding heat. You can shiver inside them in the hottest summers. What that suggests is that we should not be adopting the paper-thin walls favoured by contemporary architects, but building much thicker ones.

Medieval streetscapes are good for combating heat: narrow alleyways, once commonplace in London, provide shade from adjoining buildings. These are preferable to the grandiose plazas around tall buildings which are such a feature of showoff modernism. As for sheet glass, which is a feature of pretty well every contemporary building I hate most, it is by its nature likely to attract and trap heat, unless there are very clever compensating devices. How about just not using sheet glass? And ostracising those architects who do?

These are all doable changes. But my favourite is the simplest:

Why rely on air-conditioning when we could have the ventilation natural to man by simply letting the air in? Give us windows that open and shut: it’s that simple.