The green house effect

I write this half-naked, sucking on ice cubes, breaking off sentences to stick my head in the fridge. In the flat below, one neighbour dangles out of her window, trying to reach fresh air, while another keeps having to go to hospital because the heat exacerbates a life-threatening heart condition.

We live in a beautiful new development on the banks of the Thames. Fancy pamphlets in our lobby boast of our building’s energy efficiency. In winter, we bask in a balmy 24ºC, without having used the radiators in two years. The insulation in the walls is super-thick; our energy bills are super-low. But from spring to autumn, whatever the weather, we broil.

Welcome to eco-home hell. A brave new world of affordable homes unfit for humans to live in, built to environmentally friendly specifications that make no sense. Windows that open wide, for instance, do not exist in the eco-home. Our windows are meant to open, at an upward slant, to a maximum of 10 cm, to stop heat escaping. Air flow is supposed to be regulated by ventilators, which only succeed in recycling warm air from the rest of the building. The first summer we lived here, it was like being in a sealed vault, perfumed by the steamy stench of other residents’ dinners. It took a year of petitioning before the developers reluctantly agreed to show us how to take the windows off their restrictors. To this day, they insist we shouldn’t, ‘for safety reasons’.

Unfortunately, open windows cannot alleviate the heat built up between our walls. The Housing Health and Safety Rating System states that ‘where temperatures exceed 25ºC, mortality increases and there is an increase in strokes’ alongside a plethora of medical complaints. In our flats last year, for three months, temperatures hovered between 28ºC and 32ºC every day.