Firms notice drop in business due to heatwave

Business owners in a Shropshire town say they have noticed fewer people are shopping on the high street due to the hot weather.

It comes as the United Kingdom is in the midst of a heatwave, with temperatures expected to reach up to 38 degrees in Shropshire, two degrees warmer than the all-time June record, broken on Tuesday.

Jennifer McHale runs a florist in Whitchurch and said the high temperatures were "cooking" her plants.

"Direct sunlight, it's a scorcher so it burns so any sort of new growth, new foliage just burns," McHale said.

"It obviously doesn't look good for selling so currently we're just bringing everything inside, back indoors to the cool."

Some other parts of the West Midlands are subject to a red weather warning by the Met Office, meaning there is a risk to life in the healthy population.

Meanwhile, bookshop owner Amanda Logan said she was used to the high temperatures as she grew up in southern California.

She added she had noticed fewer people come to the high street in the hot weather.

"I'm a desert being anyway. I always say that I'm a tropical person, but this is pretty unpleasant, but I'm managing," Logan said.

"Yesterday was a lot busier than I expected it to be, but then today it's kind of tapered off.

"You will find as a small business owner that when the temperatures rise, the high street gets quiet because either people are in their houses or they're in the pubs."

Meanwhile, people working in the hospitality trade said they were seeing a similar picture.

Joshua Smyth runs Walter's House of Coffee. He said he was making sure his staff and customers could cool down.

"[We] make sure all the doors and windows are open constantly, having a nice draft coming through the building," Smyth said.

"Obviously staying hydrated throughout the day is important too, and ensure all of my staff get breaks."

"We are going to have to get used to coping with higher temperatures as a result of climate change," according to BBC West Midlands environment correspondent David Gregory-Kumar.

He said when he started in his role, heatwaves were the sort of thing we could expect with climate change, though we could not be sure it was the definite cause.

"Twenty-five years later, the science is very different," he added. "Not only can we say climate change is making this heatwave worse, scientists can say by how much."

He said studies from scientists at Climameter, a consortium of researchers that puts weather events in a climate change context, found it was making current weather patterns 2C to 4C warmer than what was typical in the 20th Century.

Gregory-Kumar said they found this out by searching records for previous similar weather events and comparing them to what was happening now.

"One worry is heat events like this week seem to be happening more often than models predicted," he added.

"It raises the prospect of the impact of climate change on us when it comes to intense heat being worse than we thought."

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