On a recent morning during another week of high temperatures, a sweltering heat was building up on London’s streets. But a cool breeze wafted through Caz Facey’s three-bedroom apartment.
There was no air-conditioning, or even a fan. Instead, an awning over the living room balcony and a Virginia creeper climbing over the kitchen window provided shade, while the apartment’s layout had been revamped to create a cross draft, helping make a comfortable indoor climate even as millions of other homes were baking in a British heat wave, with temperatures hitting 33 degrees Celsius, or 91 degrees Fahrenheit, in some areas.
“There’s nothing kind of scientific,” Ms. Facey said. “It’s all kind of natural stuff.”
Though temperatures have eased off, Britain has had a hot summer, enduring at least four heat waves, and scientists say that such periods are generally becoming hotter, more frequent and longer. As the country adapts to this new reality, residents need to learn to live in homes that were built to retain heat in what had usually been a rainy, more temperate zone.
Some, like Ms. Facey, have been redoing their homes in innovative ways to keep them cooler. But for many people living in both aging houses and modern apartment buildings, it will require expensive and complex upgrades, architects and other experts say.
Common cooling strategies, like using curtains to block out sunlight, are not long-term solutions, these experts say. Neither was an experiment to smear Greek yogurt on the outside of windows to keep the heat out, as one researcher did.
The tried-and-tested method in hotter climates, air-conditioning, is widely considered a luxury, with portable units that would cool a single room typically costing from $500 to $1,000 — and with electricity prices in Britain much higher than in other parts of Europe and the United States. And, if those units run on electricity generated from fossil fuels, they are actually contributing to climate change.
Few homes in England are known to have any form of air-conditioning, and a government-affiliated report cited research that suggested that the uptake may only increase “to around 30 percent by 2050.” While commercial buildings have embraced central cooling, the British government is reluctant to encourage central air-conditioning as it tries to meet its goal of reaching zero carbon emissions by that year.
Architects, engineers and academics say the best solution lies in improving insulation, shading and ventilation — much as Ms. Facey did — on a larger scale. But those deceptively simple retrofitting measures, which also aim to reduce carbon emissions, can still be costly, complicated and inconvenient, and to enact them widely will most likely require an investment of 250 billion pounds by 2050, according to the Climate Change Committee, a statutory body that advises the government on carbon issues.
Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till, both architects, used bales of straw, recycled concrete and sandbags to insulate and regulate the temperature of a home they built in North London on a site once used for cattle pens. Replicating it on a wider scale is challenging.
“It’s very difficult to achieve that and do it properly,” Ms. Wigglesworth said, “and you’re basically tearing the building apart in order to do it.” An affordable housing organization “almost certainly can’t afford to do it without a grant from the central government,” she said.
There are other hurdles to retrofitting. Historic buildings — red-brick Victorian and Georgian terrace homes, for instance — are often protected by conservation regulations, so changing a building’s facade is tangled in red tape. Working inside to introduce more effective insulation, which not only helps older homes retain heat in winter but also cooler air in summer, can mean cracking into decades-old molding, Ms. Wigglesworth said.
Converting London’s newer apartment buildings is even harder, said Clare Murray, an architect with Levitt Bernstein who has experience drawing up guides to retrofit buildings. Many of the gleaming angular high-rises that have sprung up in London were built before Britain’s government passed regulations to curb overheating in 2021. Their insulation was designed for winter, and their large windows tend to face one direction, trapping heat with little air circulation, according to environmental specialists.
“People appreciated the lovely views and then all of a sudden — guess what? — they overheat,” Ms. Murray said.
There are few options available for many of these buildings, according to Simon Wyatt, an environmental specialist at Cundall, an engineering consultancy. Mechanical ventilation systems and window glazing may help, but many newer buildings have the “inherent problem” of poor ventilation, Mr. Wyatt said.
“We designed to the minimum standard pretty much universally,” Mr. Wyatt said. “We don’t design to good practice.”
Sometimes, building safety regulations may discourage retrofitting. London’s public housing projects, especially those made of towering concrete blocks, are some of the most difficult to adapt, architects said.
Safety rules in England became more rigorous after the 2017 Grenfell fire tragedy. The 2022 Building Safety Act has classified buildings that typically have at least seven stories as “higher risk,” with stricter regulations for construction materials. These rules could make retrofitting more costly, and many developers simply avoid it, architects said.
The homeowners who do go it alone usually retrofit their homes as part of a larger renovation project, said Sky Moore-Clube, who said her firm, Urbanist Architecture, had seen a small but growing number of clients preparing their homes for a hotter climate. These “shallow” retrofits — replacing windows or installing insulation — achieve limited results, but they can set homes up for future adaptations.
“It’s hard to condemn people doing small retrofits because that is often all people can afford,” Ms. Moore-Clube said. Insulating the walls of a two-bedroom home or replacing the windows can cost about £20,000, or about $27,000, Ms. Moore-Clube said.
Some, like Ms. Facey, have made it a do-it-yourself project.
Having moved to London from Australia 20 years ago, Ms. Facey had grown up with sweltering summers, and when she changed houses in 2021, she heeded the warnings of climate scientists and looked for a place she could adapt to keep it cooler.
A communications consultant, Ms. Facey found an apartment in the Waterloo neighborhood of London in an estate that had been designed in the 1970s. When she renovated, she knocked out a door to create a path for a breeze. She also replaced the linoleum floor with cork and ceramic. The trees and plants outside provided organic cooling. The project cost several thousand pounds.
“London is just, like, building against nature all the time,” she said. “I’m trying to do a tiny little bit of it myself.”
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
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