LONDON – Mike Coe never thought he would leave his dream home in rural Worcestershire, not far from Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace. That was until Coe started researching the warming temperatures in the region. Coe had a job making videos for environmental activists, and ten years ago, when he spoke to his colleagues about the effects of climate change – and read the scientific papers himself – he started to get concerned.
"I realized that it was likely to get very, very hot in the British Midlands, even during my lifetime," Coe, 69, told NPR. "I said… I think we need to move to Scotland." A decade later, now Coe and his partner Lizzie Stoodley live on the Isle of Skye off Scotland's west coast. There they have built a "Passivhaus" — a highly energy-efficient home — the second they have built.
And they are glad they built their new home where they did. "Our decision to move seems to have been confirmed as being the right one, particularly this year," Coe told NPR. Friends who still live further south have told the couple that the weather was "unbelievably hot" and "incredibly uncomfortable" this summer, as the United Kingdom experienced its hottest summer on record, with five successive heat waves and widespread drought.
But while southern regions warmed up, the weather on the Isle of Skye remained temperate. "I think there are quite a few more very hot summers I might escape by living here rather than remaining where we did," Coe said. Susan Chinnery and her partner Steve Lewis, used to live near Milton Keynes, 50 miles north of London.
But they began finding the summer months increasingly uncomfortable. "I hate the hot weather," Chinnery told NPR. "I remember 2022 when Steve and I… we were actually sleeping outside on the patio because it was just too hot to sleep indoors." Like many British homes, their Victorian-era house was designed to keep in the warmth, and doesn't have air conditioning.
Lewis said that 2022 reminded him of the famously hot British summer of 1976, and he realised it was only going to get warmer. "I thought to myself, it's arrived," he told NPR. "This is the slow and inexorable decline into some new state." Last year, Chinnery and Lewis moved to Westray, one of the Orkney Islands off northern Scotland, largely because of rising temperatures.
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