Harper-Thames on Shoreditch and East London’s approach to extreme heat: the lidos, Victoria Park, and the specific way the neighbourhood responds when the temperature exceeds planning assumptions
By Harper-Thames, Shore Roar
It Is Hot; East London Has Not Let This Stop It From Being East London
The UK’s June 2026 heatwave — red alert in France, amber alert progressing toward red in London, the specific British approach to extreme heat that combines genuine concern from public health officials with a certain amount of “it’s actually quite nice if you’re in a pub garden” from people whose profession does not require them to be outside in it for eight hours — hit Shoreditch on a Thursday afternoon and was, by Saturday, the defining fact of the neighbourhood’s social landscape. Victoria Park, which is accessible from Shoreditch by a 20-minute bus ride or a 35-minute bike ride through Bethnal Green and Hackney, was at capacity by 11am on Saturday with families, friends, people who had brought speakers and people who had brought paperback novels and people who had brought both.
The specific East London response to a heatwave is worth describing because it is the best possible demonstration of what a neighbourhood’s public space provision actually means when the temperature goes up. Victoria Park — large, free, accessible, with a lido, a model boating pond, cafes, shade, and the specific combination of facilities that makes it possible to spend a full summer day there without spending much money — absorbed approximately forty thousand people on Saturday with reasonable grace, because it was designed at a time when urban parks were understood as civic infrastructure rather than amenity provision.
Haggerston Lido and the Democratic Case for Public Swimming
Haggerston Lido, the 1960s outdoor swimming pool that serves the most genuinely egalitarian recreational function in this part of London, was queued for forty minutes on Saturday morning. The queue contained people from approximately every demographic category present in the neighbourhood: families from the social housing estates nearby, young professionals from the warehouse conversions closer to Shoreditch, older residents who have been using the pool since it opened, and a significant contingent of people who had checked the weather forecast and planned accordingly. The pool, when you reached it, was cold and excellent and exactly what a heatwave requires.
Lidos are the specific form of public infrastructure that London has been best at maintaining and worst at expanding: there are fewer outdoor pools in London than there were in 1970, which is a planning decision and a funding decision and a maintenance decision that has accumulated over fifty years into a significant deficit at exactly the moments when outdoor swimming would be most valuable. The ones that remain — Haggerston, Hampstead, London Fields, Tooting Bec — are institutions in the specific sense that people who use them feel genuinely proprietary about their survival, which is the strongest possible form of community advocacy and has contributed to keeping them open through several rounds of budget pressure that would have closed less loved facilities.
The Pub Gardens: What They Become in a Heatwave
The pub gardens of Shoreditch — the beer gardens, the roof terraces, the any-available-outdoor-space-pressed-into-service as tables — become, in a heatwave, the primary social infrastructure of the neighbourhood in a way that supplements the parks rather than competing with them. The specific Shoreditch pub garden experience in a heatwave involves cold lager at a table that is technically half in direct sunlight and half in shade, with the half in shade contested among the people at the table, and the specific conversational density that East London pub culture produces when the temperature is right. The conversations at the pub on Saturday evening covered the PM’s resignation, Graduate Fashion Week, the housing market, the upcoming Burnham leadership bid, and whether it was going to be this hot all week (it was), in approximately that order and with approximately those proportions. The Timeout London guide to Shoreditch pub gardens is accurate as far as it goes and does not fully capture the specific experience of being in one when the city is very hot and everyone has decided that being outside is the only thing that makes sense. That experience is available only by going, which is the correct advice for most things in East London.
Shore Roar’s Shoreditch
The Shoreditch I write about in Shore Roar is not a single Shoreditch. It is the several Shoreditches that exist simultaneously in the same postcode, serving different communities with different needs and different relationships to the neighbourhood’s history, identity, and current commercial character. The graduate designer presenting at the Truman Brewery and the Goodhood customer browsing the Hanbury Street flagship and the Bangladeshi restaurant owner on Brick Lane and the financial professional walking through from Old Street to Liverpool Street and the artist in a studio off Bethnal Green Road are all in the same neighbourhood and are all having different experiences of it. Shore Roar’s project is to cover all of them, which is more ambitious than any one story can achieve and more accurate than any single narrative about Shoreditch can provide. The neighbourhood is large enough for all of its contradictions. The coverage should be too.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
