‘We feel like the peasants’: women and low-income families bear brunt of heatwave
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- Asad Rehman, CEO of Friends of the Earth, said the heatwave "throws a grenade into every vulnerability you already have," citing studies showing tree shade cuts urban surface temperatures by 19°C and grass by 24°C — but noting green spaces aren't distributed equally across cities.
- Emily Dickinson, 36, told The Guardian she and her family "feel like peasants" in their one-bedroom Tufnell Park flat after her 10-year-old son Oliver's school closed Tuesday alongside more than 1,000 schools nationwide, with no nearby green space to escape to.
- Arcan and Ayten Büyük Kahramanı were forced to keep their 7-year-old son Poyraz at their Islington café when his school shut, telling the paper they "can't afford to hire a babysitter" and have no family support network.
- Kimberley Lloyd, 76, from Southend, normally cares for grandson Wyatt two nights a week so her single-parent daughter can work — but heat-related travel disruption threatens to cancel that arrangement entirely.
- Charlotte Buxton, 41, from South Derbyshire, has five children including three who are autistic and said she kept her son with severe learning difficulties home from school at the cost of managing her own fibromyalgia and postural tachycardia syndrome.
- A 2022 study cited found nearly half of working-age women do an average of 45 hours of unpaid care per week, and University of Bristol professor Gemma Derrick said this default makes mothers the first responders in emergencies like heatwave-driven school closures.
Why it matters: The article makes concrete that heatwaves are social-policy failures, not just weather: over 1,000 UK schools closed in a single day, and women already doing 45 hours/week of unpaid care absorbed the childcare gap. With tree shade cutting surface temperatures 19°C in greener neighborhoods that poorer areas lack, climate change is widening an existing class and gender divide rather than creating a new one.
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