In the UK, extreme heat is anomalous rather than a chronic problem. The indeterminacy of heat is evident at street level—from the pavements to the rooftops, in the architecture of everyday life. Yet, in the era of climate heating, the built environment in Britain—which evolved for cold and damp—is increasingly maladapted for heat. According to a 2023 report by the Climate Change Committee, 19% of English bedrooms currently overheat during periods of hot weather (Climate Change Committee 2023). Urban development remains hostile to those vulnerable to heat, with accessibility of public green space, where those without private outdoor space might find respite, continuing to decline (Natural England 2025).

The British Isles’ position on the Atlantic fringe exposes its inhabitants to a procession of weather fronts. However, the Atlantic also moderates air temperatures through the year, meaning Brits are less prone to the heatwaves experienced in mainland Europe. But disrupted oceanic and atmospheric flows are unsettling Britain’s climatic regime. The frequency of extreme heat events in the UK has increased markedly in recent decades. The ten hottest years on record have all occurred since 2002, and the frequency of hot days has more than doubled since the 1960s (Met Office 2024). During the 2022 heatwave that affected much of Europe, England experienced an estimated 2,803 excess deaths among people aged over 65 years (Office for National Statistics 2022).

July 2021: heatstroke

Our 1926 semi on the edge of Frome, Somerset, fronts onto a busy mini-roundabout—a white circle adrift in a sea of tarmac and concrete. A hipped roof sits over the thick rubble walls of the house like a hat. Inside, bare floorboards in each bedroom run up to a redundant stone hearth beneath a blank chimney breast. In winter, if the windows are closed, black mould blooms behind chests and curtains. In summer, there is nothing to shade the windows from the afternoon sun. Opening the windows only draws in heat from the road, and the hot clay roof tiles radiate inwards through the vaulted ceilings. After consecutive days of high temperatures, the house is impossible to keep cool.

Our 18-month-old has spent seven nights barely sleeping in his small, hot bedroom, and the days being smeared with sunscreen. I receive a call from our childminder, slightly distressed, to say he is unwell with a high temperature. At home, I point the digital thermometer at his forehead, his drowsy eyes gazing past me—it beeps at nearly 39 degrees. At some point in the afternoon, I run a cool bath. The water is too cold and he seems to shut down in shock—almost asleep, his limp body slipping through my arms. I haul him out, cursing my stupidity. Evening comes with no improvement, so we call 999. We wait, but no paramedic arrives. The fever breaks in the small hours. A doctor calls in the morning, incredulous that paracetamol was not given. I protest, but the reality is that I didn’t know what to do.

July 2022. Twelve months later. A historic first UK temperature of above 40°C (104°C) is recorded in Lincolnshire. Wildfires cause unprecedented destruction on the outskirts of London, not far from where I grew up, engulfing at least 18 houses. Trying to avert a repeat of last summers’ trauma, I make earnest attempts at heat mitigation. An evaporative cooler purchased on special offer from Homebase (works in a desert, but useless in humid Somerset). The blinds stay closed and the house is in permanent darkness. I tape spare insulation boards to the front windows. I experiment with opening the casements in different configurations at different times. We create a heat-buffer by wilding the front garden, removing the grey slate chippings, seeding the rough soil with poppies, birds foot trefoil and yellow rattle.

Architecture as socio-environmental memory

British heatwaves are comparatively cool and infrequent next to those in lower latitude regions. In the south-western United States, for example, the city of Phoenix, Arizona endures some of the most extreme urban temperatures on Earth. In an average summer, daytime highs routinely surpass 40°C (104°F), and nighttime lows can remain above 30°C (86°F). During the same summer of 2022, Phoenix recorded 54 consecutive days above 43°C (110°F). Maricopa County recorded 425 heat-associated deaths that year (Maricopa County Dept. Public Health 2023).

But heat risk is relative—depending on place-based social knowledge, behaviors and the materialisation of infrastructures and technologies through which the effects of temperature on health are regulated and mitigated. As such, this acceleration of change—disrupting the climatological stability that has shaped our human environment and the fabric of our urban habitats—presents an unprecedented challenge for society.

For most of human history, people have constructed dwellings in dialogue with the environment. This has resulted in distinct architectural vernaculars that are, for Paul Oliver (1987), “responses to local conditions: climate, materials, and the skills available. They are lessons in survival, continuity and adaptation” (see also Rapoport 1969, Piesik 2017). Put another way, buildings and urban environments ‘remember’ past climates, practices and cultures. These memories are seen in the anatomy of the structures themselves. As observed by Juhani Pallasmaa (1996) “Buildings remember us just as we remember them.”

In the deserts of southern Arizona, indigenous and early settler architecture evolved to dissipate heat. Sonoran and Pueblo houses incorporated thick adobe walls, deep eaves for shade, small windows, courtyards and cross-ventilation through aligned doorways (see Jeffery Cook 1989, Ronald Rael 2008). Much of the housing stock retains elements of this vernacular. Other than apartments, homes with second stories—prone to trapping heat—are only for those who can afford to air-condition them.

Architectural vernaculars

Britain’s humid-temperate-oceanic climate, by contrast, produced dwellings that withstand cold and wet conditions. Pre-war housing is typified by heavy masonry walls, steep roofs, and minimal ventilation—buildings designed to keep warmth in rather than let heat escape. During the late-19th and early-20th centuries, industrial mechanisation and labour demands drove a rapid expansion of high-density, low-cost housing, creating a mosaic of vernacular forms. Inter- and post-war estates were shaped by the technological developments that accompanied the burgeoning carbon-fueled global economy. The rise of the car reshaped towns around the individualisation of transport—an economic and cultural priority of the era—without anticipating how the road networks, parking infrastructure, and the spatial separation they required would shape social life or exacerbate vulnerability in a warming climate.

After the Second World War, fields between the old manor houses and worker’s terraces on the outskirts of Frome were in-filled by cul-de-sacs of Cornish Units. Built of pale concrete panels, these prefabricated homes were a rapid fix for a bombed-out nation. Intended as a temporary solution to housing shortages, many of these prefabs remain today, often having been inherited from their orginal owners. The reinforced concrete allowed for wide openings and light, open rooms, while the mansard roofs were a cheap way to create an upper storey. But with minimal insulation and large glazed openings, they left upper rooms exposed to significant solar gain (as well as cold and damp in winter). For current residents, it is impossible to secure mortgages for Cornish Units if they have not had significant modifications—including replacement of the original concrete panels with insulated masonry walls. As Stewart Brand writes in How Buildings Learn, “[b]uildings are always tearing themselves apart as they are modified to suit the people inside them, they learn because the world changes” (1994).

On most days I walk the same transect to work, from our inter-war terrace on the outskirts of Frome, to the Town Hall near the centre. The road, a major route north, has been widened to its maximum. Footpaths, squeezed hard up against terraces or lost altogether, giving parents with small children little margin for error. Like a rising tide, the road has stranded entrances to previously accessible spaces and footways: a tree-dappled cemetery, a youth club, a children’s nursery, a quiet cut-through, a verge where bluebells grow in summer shaded by a great copper beech. On one side, narrow three-storey Georgian town houses with lead-lined dormer windows, on the other 1950s semis with large landscape windows. Architectural features that offer shade, such as eaves, shutters, canopies, are rarities. Front gardens have given way to driveways or low-maintenance hard landscaping.

Which is not to say that British town planning has failed to preserve any high quality green (and cool) space. But overwhelming priority has been given to motorists. Broader post-war urban vernaculars were configured in response to the affordability and popularity of motor vehicles: wide roads, car parks and paved areas that absorb and radiate heat. The widening of historic routes, the loss of trees and hedgerows erased natural shade. The paving of front gardens, grass verges and other green spaces to make way for vehicle parking has significantly reduced the capacity for vegetated ground to hold water and dissipate heat through evaporation. As the urban peripheries of Frome have expanded, exposure to heat along many of these corridors has been amplified.

Urban design and architecture are, in effect, contemporary articulations of accumulated environmental knowledge and the economic, technological and social priorities of their time. Before the turn of the millenium, decisions about insulation, ventilation, glazing, and the orientation of streets or homes were informed by a sub-consciousness of the climate as it is/was, not by any notional future conditions. The imperatives were those of economy, energy, post-war reconstruction, and industrial modernisation.

Coda: New Political and Cultural Vernaculars

Buildings and urban architectures remember people as well as climate. They are a socio-environmental record—stories of nature and culture written in three-dimensional, geometric landscapes. Yet increasingly it seems these are stories we have become disconnected from, just as we have become disconnected from each other. As the climate crisis gathers pace, our capacity to adapt is undermined by a political vernacular that points elsewhere. Reactionary and populist movements, with the support of fossil fuel corporations, distort climate science, turning anxiety toward issues such as migration. Meanwhile, we are diverted from the material crises unfolding around us, with dire consequences for public health. As the government retreats from the climate debate, successive home-improvement schemes have been abruptly scaled back or cancelled. The Green Homes Grant, launched in 2020 and abandoned after just six months, left thousands of households without promised retrofits and contractors unpaid (NAO 2021).

Yet Frome is relatively fortunate, in that it has a strong political vernacular of its own, which has informed and supported climate adaptation at the community level. The foundation for much of this effort was a local political revolution that saw Independents for Frome, a group with strong links to the Transition Towns movement, win all 17 seats on Frome Town Council (FTC) in 2015. What followed was a work programme that integrated concerns for climate into the political agenda through an explicit connection to people’s health. National Lottery funding was secured for the Green and Healthy Frome project, a partnership between (FTC) and the medical practice, to implement initiatives on home energy, active travel and social prescribing. Healthy Homes, in particular, links people to knowledge by which they can make sense of their building and take steps to materially improve it. A key lesson from this work has been the importance of in-person support, including home visits—a social reconnection. In this way, the complexities of diagnosing and finding solutions for specific issues—such as heat, cold and damp—can be navigated in-situ and in dialogue.

The intersections of climate and the built environment in places as different as Somerset and Phoenix tell us something. Despite their divergent practices and vernaculars, we still see their respective communities struggling with similar issues. In both places, built environments materialised in the absence of climate change and the specific problem of extreme heat. Yet, it is also a situation in which neither the urban environment, nor people are silent. Efforts such as those highlighted here remind us that adaptation is not only technical or architectural, but cultural and political: a process of recovering practices, values and forms of care that modern life has allowed to slip from view. A key challenge is in sharing the lessons from our respective communities and clearly communicating the challenges and solutions of climate heating to policy makers.

With thanks to and for conversations in developing this contribution to their zine, Heat diary: Visualizing the geography of heat. Some of this text emeged from correspondence between Brian and I, so I may have borrowed a phrase or two.

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References

Brand, S. (1994) How buildings learn: What happens after they’re built. New York: Viking.

Climate Change Committee (2023) Progress in adapting to climate change: 2023 Report to Parliament. London: CCC. Available at: https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/progress-in-adapting-to-climate-change-2023-report-to-parliament/

Cook, J. (1989) Design with adobe. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (2021) Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme: Fifteenth Report. HC 28. London: HMSO. Available at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmpubacc/28/2802.htm

Hopkins, R. (2008) The Transition handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience. Totnes: Green Books.

Maricopa County Department of Public Health (2023) 2022 Heat-Associated Deaths Report. Phoenix, AZ: MCDPH. Available at: https://www.maricopa.gov/DocumentCenter/View/26296/2022-Heat-Associated-Deaths-Report

Met Office (2024) State of the UK Climate 2023. Exeter: Met Office. Available at: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/state-of-the-uk-climate

National Audit Office (2021) Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme. HC 117. London: NAO. Available at: https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/green-homes-grant-voucher-scheme/

Natural England (2025) Written evidence submitted by Natural England (UGS0067) to the EFRA Committee Inquiry into Urban Green Spaces.
Available at: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/125876/html/

Office for National Statistics (2022) Deaths associated with the heatwave of summer 2022. Newport: ONS. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/deathsassociatedwiththeheatwaveofsummer2022/2022

Oliver, P. (1987) Dwellings: The house across the world. London: Phaidon.

Pallasmaa, J. (1996) The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses. Chichester: Wiley.

Piesik, S. (2017) Habitat: Vernacular architecture for a changing planet. London: Thames & Hudson.

Rael, R. (2008) Earth architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Rapoport, A. (1969) House form and culture. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a transect as (to paraphrase): a straight line across the earth's surface, along which observations are made. As a student and researcher, I used various types of transect to make physical measurements and observations: sediment analysis across a beach in Brittany, river habitat surveys in Iceland, land-use surveys along the streets of Welsh market towns.1

Exploding the transect

This recent fixation was inspired by the work of my friend Brian O’Neill—a sociologist and former academic colleage—whose visual ethnographic ‘Transects’ series of photo books adopts/adapts the concept to examine the intersections between social dynamics, urban life, and nature in both Paris and Phoenix.

As Brian demonstrates, transects need not necessarily be straight or even linear, nor limited to the geographical or physical. Transects may also be sinuous, social, relational, and temporal — a way of moving through moments, memories, and connections. A transect can be an approach to engaging with place that combines walking (or riding) and observing with recording and reflecting, collecting fragments of landscape, objects, histories, and encounters along the way.

Engaging in a dialogue with Brian and his network across the Atlantic, I’d like to explore a similarly exploded concept of a transect as the basis for a new strand of work here. And I have been taking the opportunity to walk a few transects in my home town of Frome, Somerset.

Moving and feeling

As Richard White has suggested, there is an embodied dimension to moving along a route that can mediate unique insights on place, space and time. First, by walking physically through a landscape you might notice dissonances between the present moment and the social or environmental histories that shaped that place. Climbers on a quarry face; an unusual hedgerow; graffiti-daubed hoardings and brambles guarding entry to what once was a bustling factory. These juxtapositions remind us that familiar sites are always layered with wider histories and relationships that continue to shape how we live together today.

Second, there is the bodily experience of movement, in which one may become more atuned to sounds, textures, and fleeting details. In this sense, a transect is not only about observing but about feeling — an embodied questioning, where insights arise as much from sensation and movement as from analysis. Thus, moving along a transect becomes a methodolgical practice that draws out connections and meanings that might otherwise remain hidden.

Dissonant experiences

Some revelations are uncomfortable, as we shall explore: the site of a geological discovery that was made possible through wealth derived from Caribbean slavery; or a plastics factory whose success depended the Middle Eastern oil boom (and the transformations in work and domestic consumption that came with it). These reflections come at a time of red crosses hanging from lamp-posts and mobs outside hotels, frightened humans whose lives have been shaped in very different ways to our own by science, extraction and profit.

To record these explorations, I plan to work with different media. Photographs and words will form the backbone, but I also plan to experiment with other media, such as video, voice notes and recorded conversations. Tracing the threads that tie together people, places and times, the objective is to tell a wider story of how people and environments are entangled.

Transects in dialogue

I also want to open an invitation for conversations, contributions and collaborations. As I make early forays into researching this project, an active and creative community is beginning to take shape—one engaged in telling similar stories through different means. Those already working in this space, or wishing to, are very welcome to get in touch.

1

Leventhorpe School Year-9 geography field trip to Brecon, Wales, 1993

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The line where these two layers meet has a geological term, it is an unconformity. And this is the De la Beche unconformity, named after the man who discovered it. Henry De la Beche was one of Britain’s earliest geologists and the first director of the British Geological Survey.

Uncomformities are like pages missing from Earth's history, showing a gap in time between the formation of the two layers.

Imagine you're building a big LEGO tower. You make a nice bottom layer, but then you stop playing for a long time. Over the course of just 175 million winters, the elements take their tole on your LEGO, it erodes and breaks down, bits of it wash away. Then one day, you come back and start building a new tower on top—but it's at a different angle and made of different blocks.

The De la Beche unconformity is a bit like that, but with rocks instead of LEGO.

The Geo Saga of Vallis Vale

🌊 Chapter 1: Ancient Sea (about 350 million years ago)

A warm shallow sea once covered the land. Over time, layers of limestone built up from shells and skeletons of sea creatures. These formed the Carboniferous Limestone you see at the bottom of the unconformity.

🏔️ Chapter 2: Mountains Rise and Rocks Tilt

Much later, huge tectonic forces tilted and folded the limestone. This was part of a massive geological event called the Variscan Orogeny, which created the elevated land we now call the Mendips.

🌧️ Chapter 3: Erosion

Exposed to the air for millions of years, rain, rivers, and wind slowly eroded the limestone, leaving a gap in the record—the "missing pages" in the story.

🦕 Chapter 4: New Sea, New Life (about 170 million years ago)

Much later, the sea returned. Sand, mud, and shells settled again, forming Jurassic rocks like the Inferior Oolite. These younger rocks were laid flat on top of the tilted limestone.

🧱 Chapter 5: Anthropocene

Now we can see both sets of rocks side by side—tilted ancient rocks below, flat younger ones above. The line where they meet is the unconformity.

The De la Beche unconformity is a silent witness to Earth's deep history—millions of years written in stone, with whole chapters torn out by time.

Today, we live in a rare moment: the last 10,000 years have given us a stable climate, the calm in which farming, cities, and all human civilisation have grown. But that period of grace, known to geologists as the holocene, is coming to an end. Some argue that we have already entered a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, where humans are the dominant driver of change at the planetary level.

Here, the pace of change is speeding up—occuring not over geological time, but in our own lifetimes. A walk to Vallis Vale reminds us how powerful Earth’s changes can be—and how important it is that we pay attention.

Snails are thought a foreign delicacy to these lands. Perhaps not in the finer metropolitan establishments, but certainly in the average country pub. Surprisingly, however—as highlighted in a recent article in Hugh Thomas’s excellent and aptly titled Wallfish Journal (subscription required)—a dish of locally-farmed snails could be enjoyed at the Miners Arms in the Somerset village of Priddy as recently as the late 90s. The landlord and snail farmer may have been something of an eccentric character, but the consumption of snails in this part of Britain was not as anomalous as you might imagine.

March of the Roman snails

Helix pomatia, the large, edible gastropod known as the Roman snail, are abundant in the Mendip Hills, where it is believed they were introduced by the Romans during their occupation of Britain. One might imagine centurions in nearby Aquae Sulis, wolfing down a plateful after a rejuvenating dip in the thermal pools that would make the city of Bath world famous. Jump forward a few thousands years, and snails were still being served to Mendip pitmen at the Miners Arms after a shift at the ore face, a century prior to being reintroduced to the menu, albeit as something of a novelty.

The Mendip Hills are formed of Carboniferous limestone, and here there is a fascinating reminder of the interplay between geology, water, food and culture. Limestone is a soluble and porous kind of rock that lends itself to the deposition of minerals like lead, which the Romans valued for plumbing. The thermal waters piped into the bathing pools of Aquae Sulis originate from these hills, flowing down through cavities in the rock to be heated at depth, and rising again beneath Bath.

Limestone, snails and other delicacies

Limestone’s alkalinity also supports the regeneration of snail shells, making the Mendip Hills a perfect environment for these slimy creatures. As a result, following their introduction, Helix pomatia have thrived to such an extent that—alongside the extractive industry pioneered by the Romans two millennia ago—they have endured to be embraced by the communities who made the most of what their landscape offered.

Arguably, then, snails can be added to the relatively short but venerable list of foods that you may describe as characteristic of Somerset, and which also bear relations to the geology that underlies the region. Cheddar, one of the world’s most-consumed cheeses, is said to have been lent its distinctive character by the ageing process that took place in the cool limestone caves of Cheddar Gorge. Meanwhile, the apple orchards of Somerset’s iconic cider industry have thrived in the rich, well-drained drained soils that are typical above limestone bedrock.

Culinary geology

The relationship between geology and food runs deep. The carboniferous limestone formation that forms the Mendips continues northeast, bisecting Britain until it meets the eastern borderlands between England and Scotland. Along its route are Bristol’s Avon Gorge, the Peak District and the Yorkshire Dales. Either side of this geological divide, the contrasting landscapes of southeast and northwest Britain have historically shaped distinct food cultures.

In the southeast, fertile soils and a milder climate supported grain farming, fruit orchards, and trade-driven varieties, resulting in a diet rich in bread, fresh dairy, and imported spices. Meanwhile, the northwest’s rugged terrain and cooler climate fostered pastoral farming, root vegetables, preserved meats, and foraging, creating a diet centered on mutton, cheese, and stews.

Today, however, much of this diversity and nuance is long lost to the global, supermarket-dominated food system. In the process, our sources of sustenance have become atomised, our cultures untethered from the land that sustains us.

Climate and food

Of course, snails remain well outside of the culinary mainstream in Britain. However, growing pressures on our food supply chain by the climate and ecological breakdown is already prompting some to look to unconventional sources of calories. Insects, long a staple in many cultures, are gaining attention as a sustainable protein source. Cricket flour, mealworm snacks, and grasshopper tacos are increasingly marketed as alternatives to resource-intensive livestock farming.

So, a future in which our children find snails on their plates, not only in posh restaurants but even at home, is not impossible. Given recent concerns over the impact of our shifting weather patterns on populations of pollinating insects, soil fertility and global harvests, it may even be necessary.

Slow food culture

But perhaps the case of the humble Mendip wallfish serves as a reminder to look down, as well as back, to the links between the geological and the culinary. This resonates with the growing momentum behind local and ‘slow’ food movement, which encourages people to reconnect with the supply chain and reduce the size of their foodprint. The Frome Food Network is one group behind this movement in Somerset, supporting events like This Food is Rubbish, which framed the snail (among other foodstuffs) as locally abundant but underappreciated through Cherry Truluck and Annalee Levin’s edible lecture.

To paraphrase food expert and journalist Hugh Thomas, the reason we like to have a sense of local food culture is because we fear losing a connection to the past. “A food culture offers a shared identity for people living within it—one which can and should help those people form a deeper, positive relationship with food in general”, he writes. “Eating snails is part of the story of Somerset’s past, its natural geography, and its people.” Perhaps understanding our geological heritage is another way to foster an even ‘deeper’ appreciation for the food on our plates and the landscapes that produce it.

With thanks to of , who inspired this article and encouraged me to write it.