The UK’s record for the hottest May day fell for a second straight day on Tuesday as Kew Gardens in south-west London reached a provisional 35.1C. Wales also broke its May record for a consecutive day, with Cardiff’s Bute Park hitting 32.3C as much of England and Wales remained in an official heatwave.
On Monday, Kew Gardens had already recorded 34.8C, while Hawarden Airport in Flintshire set a Welsh May record at 32.2C. The Met Office said the benchmark that had stood at 32.8C in 1922 and 1944 was now being beaten by a full two degrees Celsius on consecutive days, a measure of how sharply the heat has surged across the country.
The heat is not just a numbers story. Six amber heat health alerts issued by the UK Health Security Agency covered much of England and stayed in place until Thursday, with warnings that significant impacts were likely across health and social care services because of increased demand caused by the high temperatures. For a country where a heatwave is defined by three days in a row above 25C in northern and western areas, or 28C in London and the Home Counties, Tuesday’s readings confirmed the spell had settled in.
The weather has also carried a grim toll on the water. A body was recovered from the River Ribble in Lancashire on Tuesday evening after emergency services launched a search earlier in the day for a 12-year-old boy who got into difficulty while swimming with friends. In South Yorkshire, a body was recovered from Rother Valley Country Park in the early hours of Tuesday after a teenage boy went missing. Those deaths followed a 13-year-old boy’s death on Monday after getting into difficulty in a reservoir in Halifax, the recovery of a teenage girl’s body at Kingsbury Water Park in Warwickshire on Monday evening, and the death of a man in his 60s at Tregirls Beach near Padstow, Cornwall, after he ran into the sea to help two relatives in trouble. On Sunday, 15-year-old Declan Sawyer died at a lake in Lincoln.
The Royal Life Saving Society urged people to stay safe, warning that warmer weather unfortunately sees an increase in accidental drownings. The Met Office also warned of the risk of cold shock, saying sea and other open water temperatures remain far lower than the air temperatures people feel on land. Dan Suri, the Met Office’s chief operational meteorologist, said the heat was being driven by warmth building under an area of high pressure near the UK, the kind of setup that can lock in hot conditions for days at a time.
That is why today matters: the record heat is not arriving alone, but alongside an active public-health warning and a run of water-related deaths that has made the dangers immediate. The next test is whether the heat begins to ease by Thursday, or whether the combination of high temperatures, pressure-driven weather and crowded open water keeps pushing the risks higher.
