Let us know your thoughts. We will be putting them into a bid for funding to help the community. Thank you!
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We know that extremes of heat (and cold) affect different people in different ways and some more than others. We’d like to hear from readers what are their main frustrations when it’s hot in south London. Do let us know!
To get the ball rolling, we asked volunteers, trustees and staff for their three top comments on how the recent heat has affected their daily lives. Here are some of the comments.
- Keeping cool at home – the way flats are built they don’t ‘breathe’ so get very stuffy. Sometimes you can only use part of the home – the bit that has some shade.
- Roofing insulation can help, apparently, but is this viable when so many Pollards Hill roofs are flat?
- Top flats are worst off because heat rises.
- Public transport – no one wants to walk so the buses are overcrowded and overheated. Only some have air conditioning and the windows on others are to tiny to get much of a breeze going. Trains – in some cases there are fewer trains and more people so commuting is unbearable and exhausting.
- Impact on NHS – London Ambulance Service and A+E – so many emergency calls due to heat, eg people with epilepsy affected that the wait-times are long.
- (From a home-hairdresser) Older people at home are following the ‘keep windows and curtains drawn’ advice religiously and it really depends what kind of housing you are in. Sometimes finds older people sitting in semi-dark (bad for falls) in temperatures of 35+ degrees. Need to teach about how to encourage a ‘through breeze’ for example.
- Getting to sleep in the hot evenings and nights is difficult.
- Front door expanded in the heat – now only shuts if you bang it shut and doing this repeatedly has led to cracks in the walls.
- (From a teacher) At school all students, whatever their usual capabilities, find it hard to concentrate. Teacher has adapted lesson content to include more discussions and fewer exercises on their own.
- Students allowed to wear PE kit and many shut at 12 noon or 1pm. Was this helpful? Mixed views on this.
- Parks and gardens – grass is brown/golden and ponds have dried up. Dead fish.
- Work cooling system (at a local authority building) only designed to work in temperatures up to 29 degrees so it packed up leaving the offices with no cooling for two weeks.
Let us know your thoughts. We will be putting them into a bid for funding to help the community. Thank you!
Contact us: email hidden; JavaScript is required
