Britons sweltered on what was dubbed “furnace Friday”, though temperatures appeared not to have set new records after overnight storms, according to figures from government weather forecasters at the Met Office.
On Thursday, temperatures reached 35.3 degrees Celsius at Faversham in Kent, southeast England, officially making it the hottest day of the year so far. “Yesterday’s provisional top temperature looks set to be 34.7C, recorded at Tibenham Airfield in Norfolk,” the Met Office said late yesterday, as rain started to fall in London.
The all-time British record is 38.5C set in August 2003 near Faversham, while the highest July temperature was 36.7C in 2015 at London’s Heathrow airport.
Britain’s prolonged heatwave has turned green grass brown, triggered an impending hose pipe ban in the northwest of England, and prompted a warning from the government for people to keep out of the sun.
Farmers have also warned of possible food shortages and hospitals have been stretched by an increase in patients with heat-related ailments.
The National Farmers Union said it would hold a summit with government officials and other farming bodies on August 1 to discuss how to mitigate the effect of the unusually hot, dry weather, which is forecast to continue.
“Some areas are expected to see thunderstorms and rain over the next couple of days but that won’t mitigate the many issues farmers are experiencing,” NFU President Minette Batters said.
The heat was seriously disrupting travel across Britain yesterday.
Problems were caused at Eurotunnel when the air conditioning system on its trains, which carry cars, coaches and HGVs, was unable to cope with “extreme temperatures”. This prompted Eurotunnel to cancel thousands of tickets on one of the busiest weeks of the year for cross-Channel travel, due to the start of many school summer holidays.
The firm took the “unprecedented decision” to stop passengers from travelling yesterday. By mid-morning, queues to check-in had been reduced to 30 minutes, but with a further 90-minute wait before passengers were able to drive on to the Shuttle trains.
At St Pancras, thousands of Eurostar passengers queued amid fears that services would suffer knock-on disruption. From 7am a huge queue snaked around the station with one staff member saying “I have never seen it like this before”.
Mary and Carly Weingard, from the US, arrived for their 8.31am service to Amsterdam more than two hours before departure. Weingard said: “We saw about problems on Thursday at Folkestone and so got here really early. The queues are amazingly long we didn’t think it would be this bad.”
Connor Mitchell was heading to Disneyland Paris with his six-year-old son. He said: “It all looks ok but we are sweltering in this queue. It’s a holiday of a lifetime for my son. We need to make it there. When we watched the news we feared the worst.”
London Fire Brigade commissioner Dany Cotton yesterday wrote to all London councils requesting a temporary ban on barbecues in public parks after a record-breaking number of grass fires. On Thursday firefighters battled grass fires in Walthamstow, Beckton, West Wickham and Beckenham – where eight hectares of grass and woodland caught fire.
Meanwhile, a man drowned and two teenagers were missing after going swimming.
The body of the man, thought to be in his twenties, was recovered from the Jubilee river in Slough after police were alerted on Thursday night.
Coastguards yesterday morning resumed the search for a 14-year-old boy last seen swimming with a friend off Clacton pier in Essex. The friend was rescued by a lifeboat.
Meanwhile, police in Warwickshire were searching for a 17-year-old who disappeared in a lake.