How heatwave-proof are our homes?

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, the author of a new book on ADHD explains how it really impacts dating and relationships. I think it can bring really good things like intense connection and spontaneity and also emotional intensity. But missed plans and impulsive choices can be mistaken for lack of care. And basically, it all works as long as those people understand how ADHD affects communication and planning, which you can't really do on a first date.

0:48But first, heat health alerts are in force for all of England, with potential highs of 34 degrees forecast as another spell of hot weather hits the UK. The capital will see some of the hottest temperatures in the country amid the fourth heat wave of the summer. An amber heat health warning is in place for London from 9am on Tuesday to 6pm on Wednesday, along with parts of the Midlands and the South East. An official UK heatwave takes place when a location records at least three consecutive days with daily maximum temperatures meeting or exceeding the heatwave temperature threshold, which in London is 28 degrees.

1:27The National Drought Group has warned that England is now suffering from nationally significant water shortfalls. But as London faces another heatwave, residents of tower blocks are at particular risk, and experts say that many new homes being built in the UK are simply not designed to withstand extreme summer temperatures. To find out more, I spoke to architecture writer Finn Harper. Finn, several years ago, you came across a sign by some new build flats in East London. Tell me more about that. I think it's in Stratford, probably built in the last 10 years, if not even more recently. And residents had put a huge sign in the window.

2:04And it's very high up, so kind of hard to see from street level. But it said, don't buy too hot. And what they were doing was warning people who might be considering buying an apartment in that block not to do it. because they were clearly experiencing quite dramatic overheating in their probably very small flats with probably very large glass windows and were clearly really struggling under the strain of that overheating and so we're trying to stop other people from buying into their flat which is a kind of wild thing to do because in doing so they will clearly be having a huge negative impact on their own house price they'll be taking a hit financially for that they were trying to warn people not to buy into that block.

2:42And what is it about tower blocks that mean they're susceptible to overheating? It's not exactly that tower blocks overheat, but modern tower blocks overheat. So back in the 60s, we designed things in a different way, many would say a better way. It's only in recent years, this has become such a significant problem. And a huge driver of it is the fact that property developers are getting better, arguably at squeezing more and more flats into the same footprint of a block. So in the past, maybe in the 60s, you might have a tower block that had windows at both sides and there was maybe one corridor and then you'd access your flat off that corridor and you'd have windows at both sides of your building.

3:21So if one side was really hot, you could always retreat to the other side and you could open windows at both sides to allow a breeze to blow through your home. Whereas today, very, very rarely see contemporary tower blocks that have that kind of floor plan. And often what you're getting is what's called double stacking, where there's one apartment either side of a corridor. And so you only ever get windows facing one direction. What that means is if your windows, if your flats windows are facing south or facing the sun, you're getting this huge wall of heat and there's nowhere to retreat to. Why does UK housing have such poor environmental credentials?

3:56Until recent years, we had fairly mild climates and we were also early to industrialise. So if you think the Victorian period, the climate is fairly mild, but also there's loads of coal and it's really cheap. So it's quite easy to burn coal in the winter to keep your house warm. So we never really had to do what people have always done in Spain or the south of France or even in the Scandinavian countries of thinking carefully about environmental performance. We've been able to get away with quite shoddy environmental design for our homes for a long time, their ability to weather extreme heat. But we don't live in that world anymore.

4:27There's a real need for architects, but also property developers to revisit some of these assumptions about packing in loads of people into small spaces with not particularly good shading, not particularly good ventilation, not particularly good insulation. If your temperature inside your flat is getting too high, that can be a risk to your heart. It can be a risk to children. It can be a risk to the pets. We really need to kind of pull our socks up on this issue. And there's lots of stuff you can do. You can retrofit external shading even onto badly designed blocks to provide cooling. and you can improve the insulation because of course insulation works in the winter to keep the warm in but it also works in the summer to keep the warm out so if we could improve our insulation improve our shading and stop being so greedy when it comes to cramming too many people into one block of flats that would make a huge difference.

5:14And joining us now is Joshua Emden a senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank. Josh why are our homes overheating? The UK's housing stock wasn't designed with high heat in mind. It's actually a bit of a social media for no one at the moment. You have people coming to London and saying how particularly hot and muggy and uncomfortable it is here compared to other countries, even where other countries might have much higher temperatures. And part of the reason for that is that air conditioning is a part of their life, almost standard. We don't have that in the UK.

5:46There's obviously also a kind of effect of heating when you are in big cities, and that's something that's true across the world. This was known as the urban heat island effect. Essentially, you have lots of kind of concrete and asphalt that warms up, makes temperatures that bit higher in cities than elsewhere. But it's particularly bad in the UK because we don't have buildings, as I say, that are designed with cooling in mind. And how have we ended up in this situation? In the 80s and 90s, and to some extent in the 2000s as well, we had a dash for gas. We had lots of gas resources in the North Sea.

6:17And we decided that we were going to equip all of our homes with gas boilers because we had cheap accessible gas at the time. And that meant that we've equipped our homes with lots of gas boilers, which are very good at kind of heating things up very quickly. But they weren't designed with more of a gradual heating profile in mind that other countries have. And they certainly weren't designed with cooling in mind. So there's a sort of historical reason why we've gone in one direction as opposed to another. And I think also just fundamentally, the UK was a colder country. We are seeing heat waves getting more frequent and more intense as a result of climate change.

6:50And we are now entering a period where that is no longer true. So what can we do about this? So at a city level, there are things that you can do around things like natural adaptation. At a basic level, that's planting more trees, having more tree cover on our streets. London is an interesting example. We have London Plain Tree, as it's known, which is this incredibly resilient tree that's lasted hundreds of years. The first one was planted in the 18th century and is still kind of alive today. And it's particularly good from a climate resilience perspective, because what often happens when you plant trees is that they're very good at cooling, but above a certain temperature, they stop cooling quite as much.

7:24This particular type of tree is very good at continuing to cool the area around it, even at higher temperatures. So there are some resilient kind of trees that we already have in London, we can start to plant more of, we can start to paint some of the buildings, so the tops of the buildings white or have reflective surfaces so that it reflects some of the heat back and it doesn't bring in this kind of urban heating effect. But there's also obviously things that we can do at an individual level, which is to get things like heat pumps, particularly air-to-air heat pumps that can be quite appropriate for smaller houses and flats.

7:53And air-to-air heat pumps, essentially, it's just, if you think about a bit like a fridge, if you feel around the back of a fridge, you can feel it's quite hot at the back of a fridge, but it's cold inside. That's quite similar to what a heat pump does. It's that, but in reverse, so it can heat your home up in colder temperatures. But also with air-to-air heat pumps, it just kind of switches the process around. It can also cool your home at the same time. Having technologies like that in our homes could be really important because they're effectively both a heating and a cooling unit that can help us throughout the seasons.

8:20I think there's also just something about having building design codes that allow for a lot more natural circulation of air in properties. If you look at things like what's known as the passive house standard, this is like a really high quality building standard that is starting to happen in the UK, but it's much more prevalent in countries like Germany. That's the kind of standard that we could be looking to build our homes to, because in those situations, it's not just that the home is really nice and toasty in the winter, but it's also very good at keeping circulation going in the summer as well.

8:49Climate change is here and now, and it's happening right now. So it's about adapting to that reality as well as trying to stop it from getting worse. let's go to a break coming up in part two why our attention economy is making it more difficult than ever to understand the neurodevelopmental disorder adhd we'll see you back here in just a moment

9:19welcome back the world of dating isn't for the faint-hearted but it can be even more challenging for those with a neurological condition. It's why the author Amber Medland decided to write a book titled Attention Seeker to shed light on what it's really like to live with ADHD and how it intersects with daily life, from dating to education and employment. The book is even designed to mimic an ADHD brain and is full of tangents and whimsies, so readers get a sense of how different it is and how hard it can be to live with the volume turned up. Joining us now is Amber herself. First of all, Amber, can you explain what ADHD is?

10:00It's a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity. It's not a mental health disorder, even though it overlaps with many mental health disorders, but it's a neurodevelopmental disorder in the same way something like autism spectrum disorder is. And why did you decide to write Attention Seeker? I was getting increasingly frustrated by coverage of ADHD in the media, which seemed quite often full of misinformation and often with a spoonful of contempt. So I wanted to write a corrective so that I could have a book to recommend people to. Basically the book.

10:34The book didn't exist yet. What are some of the biggest misconceptions or negative stereotypes about ADHD? Yeah, there are so many. I have some favourites, which is things like being a bit scatterbrained or like whimsical. If something doesn't cause functional impairment in multiple different settings, then it's not ADHD. Like it might be a personality trait. This idea that it's a trendy self-diagnosis people pick up on TikTok, which it's not, that it only affects hyperactive little boys bouncing off walls, or that people with ADHD are lazy, or that it's caused by bad parenting, or, really important one, the idea that being able to focus on something you love, like video games, mean you can't have ADHD.

11:13That's a very common one because you see people with ADHD hyper-focusing, but then they can't do something like their dishes. Some people believe the condition is overdiagnosed, and it's quite common to hear people say things like, like, oh, I must have ADHD. What do you make of that? The latest version of people being sad and then saying, oh, I must be really depressed and not understanding the essential difference. I think saying I must have ADHD can trivialise it. but on the other hand our environment is more distracting than ever so the cultural noise of people saying I must have ADHD can make it way harder for people with ADHD to seek help and get taken seriously.

11:54The fact is that like over diagnosis is still discussed way more than under diagnosis even though women, people of colour and inattentive type rather than hyperactive type ADHD people are still routinely dismissed. How does our attention economy make it more difficult to understand this neurological condition? I think the odds really stacked against us. Our world is engineered to hijack our attention every time advertising the internet, and it makes it very hard to distinguish between everyday distraction and ADHD, because the constant stimulation blurs the line between tech-induced attention issues and neurological difference.

12:32And it can fold into this idea that ADHD is just part of modern life. So why is app dating particularly harmful? They're all basically like slot machines and just endless swipes. And the idea that, you know, pull the lever one more time and you might meet your perfect person, which leads to huge dopamine spikes. And it can really exacerbate this cycle of highs and lows, which a lot of us with ADHD live personally. I just definitely spent more times on the apps than I did intentionally going on dates and trying to understand other people. It felt like a game. And because ADHD people have low dopamine in the brain, it makes the apps themselves intensely rewarding.

13:10But like the app isn't meant to be the point. Finding someone is meant to be the point. So if you're dating someone with ADHD, what advice do you have? Be direct and clear and kind. Don't take last minute changes in the plan personally. At the same time, your job isn't to cater to every whim of a person with ADHD. Like it's okay to be like, no, we said we'd do this. Let's stick to the plan. And that's not cruel. I think just keeping things as simple as possible helps a lot. What are the benefits then of dating someone with ADHD? Sense of humour is a huge one. I spoke to 50 people for my book and I swear everyone was funny, which makes emails a lot better.

13:46We often notice details other people's myths and because we were always trying to work out like how to do things little boring things like the washing up can become like an assault course I think it can make daily life more fun it just also makes daily life more difficult finally what do you want people to take away from the book I think the good thing is even though it doesn't make dating itself easier is that everything that makes dating hard can make actual relationships really good it's just that like dating is hard for everyone and it's just that little bit harder so if me and my boyfriend get into a fight or a bad rhythm on something I can stop functioning pretty quickly so we have to calmly discuss things and troubleshoot them early like resentments don't fester because things just grind to a halt and I think there's a lot to be said for having to communicate but like on a first date no one wants to like meta-analyze things because that's yeah not sexy

14:47and that's the standard for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk if you'd like to get in touch please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk we'll be back here tomorrow at 5pm we'll see you then