Overheated

Living through a heatwave depends on your situation in life, to use a hackneyed analogy we’re all in the same storm, but we’re not all in the same boat. Last Thursday I cycled over to the leafy side of Bristol early in the morning to work a shift at Forest School. I worked until 3pm, deep in the shade of mature trees, feeling so grateful that I wasn’t in an overheated classroom, office, or even my own stuffy house. Leaving the embrace of the branches was a wrench, strapping the chunk of expanded polystyrene that is my cycle helmet onto my head felt like a punishment. I rode down towards the city centre along stifling streets, slaloming between glistening patches of melted tar, the smell of it in my nostrils. I sweltered and simmered resentfully at the thought of air-conditioned cars. A hot breeze met me, at times it took my breath away. I was experiencing the Urban Heating Effect in full force, and I felt like a chapatti in a pan. Urban Heating describes how cities can be significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas, due to the higher density of development. All those hard surfaces, nowhere for the heat to go.

Yet here’s the contrary thing, I love living in a city, and as human settlements go, getting a whole bunch of us together living closely packed makes a lot of sense in terms of providing the things we all need. According to Wikipedia, urban areas cover about 0.5% of the planet’s surface, but are home to more than half than the world’s population, so surely it’s time to get serious about making them liveable and able to cope with regular heatwaves. Walking slowly down through a tree-lined avenue in my local park at the weekend was a comfortable cool moment on a day where the temperature was over 30 degrees. At first glance the place looked empty, large swathes where the grass had been recently cut were just blonde stubble on sunbaked earth, no picnic blankets to be seen. But then look again, huddled in puddles of shade under each large tree, that’s where the people were.

I bumped into a friend from walking group, unenthusiastically taking her seven year old to a birthday party in one of those wilting shade-hugging groups. She works as a nurse in a local GP practice, seeing a stream of vulnerable patients with only a desk fan to sluggishly stir the hot air. She looked exhausted, telling me that the internal temperature in her consulting room had hit 38 degrees during the week, that she worried about making mistakes in the heat, and about her patients coping in overheated homes. Individualistic capitalism has a solution of course, we can all just buy air con units for each of our houses, nothing to worry about here, the market will provide. There are so many things to make you tired, the extra stress of high temperature on your body, the lack of sleep through sweaty airless nights, but perhaps the biggest is living with the dissonance that the human race could be working so much harder to tackle this mess of our own making. Progress seems so painfully slow.

Our political leaders seem to be too busy with internal strife, squabbling about who gets to be the leader of the gang, to knuckle down and get on with the work that needs to be done. A recent low traffic neighbourhood trial near where I live in Bristol has caused so much division, showing that weakening the addiction to private cars is a tough one to crack. There are so many impossible problems, but we have to start somewhere. Maybe it’s time to stop worrying about whether we have the right answers and just get on with some of it. During intense heat a few weeks ago, when the schools closed, a local community centre took things into their own hands. They became a communal cool place, turning on their air conditioning and opening the doors to local families and older people, offering cool drinks and creative activities. Over 500 people visited them over the two days. The centre is run by a small not-for-profit organisation who took over last year, raising funds to renovate the building (including the all important air con). Their small scale and independence meant that they could see what was needed, and they could make it happen.

Recently I had the opportunity to sing in St Mary Redcliffe church as part of the Tideway Choir. A softly-spoken tufty-headed sound artist emerged from behind his laptop and described how he had recorded bird sounds in St Phillips Marsh, a place of rapid change and development including the shiny slice of glass and steel that is the new University of Bristol Enterprise campus. More hard surfaces, jolly good. He had taken the ambient sounds of the place, tweaked and modified them to create melodies for human voices, and so we sang. He will stitch them together and blend them to make a piece that will be installed for people to listen to on the ‘bridge to nowhere’. This is a romantic name for a footbridge built to access a Bristol Arena that never was. I liked that he was taking something unfinished and making something from it. A reminder that we can come together and make things. We can plant trees too. Let’s not wait.

This week I have been mostly covering my downstairs windows with emergency foil blankets. Our house looks a little odd, but it's slightly cooler inside. It is a well-insulated 1970s terrace, more accustomed to keeping heat in than letting it out. I have been spotting butterflies, which are very lovely, but don't really outweigh the climate grief. Photo shows the vaulted ceiling at St Mary Redcliffe, it reminds me of the branches of an avenue of trees.