Who remembers the summer of 1976?

[DameDiazepamTheDramaQueen]

2 weeks of weather like yesterday,over 30 degrees and 45 days with no rain.

I was 5, I remember endless playing late in the evenings, dad digging a hole and lining it with tarpaulin and filling it with water so we had a paddling pool , riding my chopper bike that my parents bought from our neighbour as he'd outgrown it and lots of ice creams 😂

Remember it like it was yesterday. The grass in the garden was scorched, I can remember my dad and brother watching cricket on the TV, with remarks from my mum about them not getting any fresh air.
Holiday in Devon - absolutely glorious, loved it.
I had a broken foot at one point as well and to get me out a neighbour let use an old pushchair. I was quite tall so it was a squeeze but I can just remember laughing in it. Everyone knew everyone so it wasn’t like anyone asked why!
We had one tiny little tape recorder. I can remember fixing it to the radio every Sunday to tape the Top 40. Not an exact science as it recorded every surrounding noise.
Managed to get to No 1 one week and the ice cream man pulled up outside right in the middle of the song - still have the tape!
My dad got his first ever car - lots of trips out, singing songs from Sesame Street.
We had a cinema at the end of the road - frequent flyers there as well.
The tiny freezer compartment in the fridge rammed with ice cream.

17, studying for A levels. Part time job fruit picking. Bath water used for the vegetable patch. Was staying out in the country and was so glad I didn’t have to get on the tube!

Only very vaguely I would have been coming up to three my birthday is in November I have memories of sitting in the washing up bowl filled with water on the front step.

Same here!

I don’t have skin cancer (yet) but am fully expecting I will develop it as everyone else in my family has. All those years of coconut oil will take their toll eventually.

I wasn’t born then but my mum talks about that summer a lot. How you could fry an egg outside in a frying pan on the pavement apparently!

I don't know anyone who actually did this but they did it as a stunt on the News.

Just finished o levels. Got part time job in trendy clothing shop. Met my husband to be. Went everywhere with best friend including boat holiday. Best friend and exdh sadly both dead now. I’d say it was the best time of my life

I remember revising for my O levels on a sunlounger. I also remember standpipes in the street because of water shortages. I still feel quite nostalgic about that summer.

I was 8. I remember it but mostly because I went on my first plane trip as we went to Menorca that whitsun holiday. Then the heatwave started when we got home. Our class teacher devised a system were we could all go and have a drink from the water fountain in turn, round the class, each child returning, silently tapping the shoulder of the next on the register, so they knew it was their turn for a trip to the fountain! I have memories of hot summer days playing outside endlessly, the freedom of 70s childhood playing out. So not necessarily sure if those memories are of '76 or not.

I do remember that 1977, in contrast, had lots of rain

Actually I remember, in 76, it was mostly talked about a drought not a heatwave. When I first learned about water saving etc.

@3beesinmybonnet, the cricket quote is famous, a boyfriend had a book in the 80s based on Private Eye's Colemanballs column (daft remarks by sport commentators) and it was number one.

I turned 7 that summer, I remember a humid and thundery trip to London on my birthday then staying with an aunt in rural Cambs and stubble fires everywhere. My brother and I would go out to play in the (secluded!) garden starkers, early in the morning before we had to worry about sunburn.

Gosh, yes! I’d forgotten but my brother-in-law was a builder and I remember him now saying he fried eggs on a shovel!

Long white socks with sandals. A caravan in Weymouth with floral curtains. A swimsuit made of pretty much the same material as the curtains. Steve Harley singing Here Comes the Sun on the radio and going to the Radio One Road Show on the beach. Children's birthday parties where we all sat around a wallpaper table in the garden and ate jelly from paper dishes.

The burning hot plastic seat on the back of my bare legs when my cousins and I all squeezed into the back of Dad's fag scented Zodiac. Singing along to Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep on the Eight Track as we whizzed through the countryside to a pub where we'd play outside and drink red lemonade through straws.

All piled up sleepily on the way home. All the adults pissed as farts and no seat belts. Bloody brilliant. I'm so nostalgic for it all.

That is my idea of heaven.

Very well, I was doing my O levels that summer. After the exams we went to the Lake District for a weeks holiday, it was lovely and green. As we drove back down to London the landscape just got browner and browner, it looked like a desert.

Then we went to stay with my granny in Cornwall. There was lots of larking about siphoning the bath water down to water the garden. She was in despair over her lawn which was just baked mud with little bits of straw scattered over it. Amazingly it did recover though.

Yes, I was a teenager just finished O levels.
The summer was memorable not for the heat but for the weeks and weeks of sunshine with no rain whatsoever. Everything dried up, plants died, there was so little water we had to share baths and many people had standpipes in the streets. Reservoirs were empty and there were fewer of them then. It was because of that summer that Britain built more reservoirs subsequently.

We've had higher temperatures since then but never so little water, although I suspect it may happen in the future if we don't plan ahead as a country (rising population numbers, more demand on water resources, climate change).

I wasn’t born! However my parents were married in August 1976. On the day the rain came!

Iconic memory. It’s tough to match!

That’s made my cry. Beautifully written.

I was twenty and I worked in an office on the top floor that had huge windows, it was like working in an oven! I went out and bought a washing up bowl, filled it with cold water and used to sit with my feet in it to help cool me down! ( I did have the office to myself)

People spilled out of the pubs to sit outside just really enjoying the slightly cooler evenings, every lawn was baked yellow, and queuing at the stand pipes for water. Girls dressed in smocks or hot pants, and the guys in loon pants. The smell of patchouli oil everywhere.
I look back on it fondly, it was a great time to be that age, at that time and the summer seemed to go on forever.

Read Jilly Cooper's 'Octavia' it is set in that summer and as always JC's description of the English countryside is sublime.

I remember the annual Guide and Scout camp, which that year was in the grounds of the convent where later on Sister Wendy Beckett lived. Don't remember much about the heat though.

Aaah! 1975 was hot and dry, but 1976 was epic. Endless summer days, bouncing around the garden on Space Hoppers and listening out for the jingle of the ice-cream van. Helping my wonderful Grandma feed the fish in her pond.

That was our last summer with Grandma. She died of cancer by the following Easter. I treasure those memories.

I do. I spent all of it indoors as I was recovering from a bad car crash ( see username), and was not allowed out in the sun until my face had healed. I was 10 and really missed not being out with my friends.

Big wildfire where I lived. Scary. But remember lots of swimming. Daily rotation of swimming pool, river, or lake. Arsey landowner won't allow river swimming there now, and lake is a conservation area with no swimming, so fewer options.

I was 7, my brother and I had mumps for some of the summer, we were so poorly, my poor mother was a slave to us as we were terrible patients.