Brittle and dry: London in the heat wave

Everywhere is the dry rustle of dead leaves. They’re in the park, on my street on the way to the train, in the gutters, and on the driveways. It’s windy, but the hot air blowing past does little to help with the intense heat. It’s even worse in the sun.

But six months ago, when we published a set of field recordings to chronicle a small, oddly-shaped park in Shoreditch called Weavers Fields, London didn’t feel remotely this way. Even though there wasn’t much in most of the park except a thin layer of grass, the trees and hedgerows around its edges sheltered a chirping, rustling sanctuary of life. But that was in winter, and a mild one, and the park-border sanctuary felt fragile even then. With the arrival of forty-degree heat across London and most of southeastern England on Monday, I travelled back to Weavers Fields to hear what had become of its subtly lively character.

I had, to be honest, been faintly surprised to find that the trains were still running at all during the heat wave. Street vendors and bin collectors were also out, but moving languidly, some wearing towels on their heads, and occasionally grimacing. Every few hundred yards, an air conditioner or a junction box blew hot air out into the street with a startling roar.

But for the most part, life looked relatively normal: people good-temperedly held it together and even basked in the heat. Birds still twittered, I saw no one collapse from dehydration, and the indie coffee places almost all had their doors open. The people who had come out onto the street, to smoke or to survey the heat or both, looked determined to stay out.  The curly-haired guy I passed lounging in a white knitted tank top on Cheshire Street was still there when I returned half an hour later. The sparrows chirped more than usual, and London sounded momentarily like Hong Kong, the last place I found myself in this kind of heat.