1846 and All That – Was June 2026 Really the Hottest Ever in England?

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“No”, is the short answer. The Met Office should not simply disregard the Central England Temperature (CET) record in which the mean temperature for June 1846 is significantly higher than that during even the recent record-breaking Junes. In other news, over the first 6 months the year 2026 HAS been the hottest on record. 2026 overall is now likely to be the hottest year to date, possibly by a significant margin.

These are the headlines on Met Office articles for 2025 and 2026:

Fig 1 Met Office articles reporting on hot Junes in 2025 and 2026

Midsummer deja vu madness.

I bookmarked the 2025 article but never got round to writing about it, until now.

Here’s the problem:

Fig 2 Mean June CET graph, created by Tim Joslin from Met Office data

Yes, obviously June 1846, not to mention June 1676, was significantly warmer than June 2026.

It’s a case of Premier League syndrome, whereby all records before a certain date are disregarded, as if no-one played football in England before August 15th 1992 or the country had no weather before 1884.

The Met Office should at least qualify its reports and note that the available historical records indicate hotter Junes in the past, as is discussed, for example, in this interesting piece by Stephen Burt of the University of Reading.

It’s not as if there isn’t a historical record of the summer of 1846. Here’s a great edition of the Guardian’s excellent Weatherwatch column which I didn’t mention in 2023:

Fig 3 Article from the Guardian’s Weatherwatch column

Could be quite an insurance bill if something like this happened now, what with all those dentable cars with windscreens on the roads!

Furthermore, 1846 suggests Junes in the current era could be significantly hotter than in 2025 or 2026 (and 2023 when I also lamented the Met Office’s reporting).

This matters because – as I wrote back in 2023 – June 1846 was over 3.5C hotter than the 11 and 21-year running means at the time for Junes in the CET. June 2026 was only about 2C hotter than the same measures for the current era. So if we have a really freak year – with longer and/or hotter heatwaves – June could average maybe as much as 19C, rather than the 17.4C in 2026.

Given that the June CET has averaged 17C or above in 3 of the last 4 years, it could be that such temperatures are now normal and we have yet to experience a really hot June in the global warming era. Or we may have seen a few exceptionally hot Junes. Time – more data – will tell.

What hasn’t been commented on too much (AFAIK) is the warmth in the first half of 2026, at least since January:

Fig 4 Screengrab of latest (3rd July) Met Office CET report for 2026 to date

In fact, the first 6 months of 2026 were the warmest in the CET, by quite a significant margin:


Fig 5 Mean Jan-June CET graph, created by Tim Joslin from Met Office data

As the Met Office notes (in Fig 4), the rest of the year only needs to be 1.09C warmer than the baseline (the 1961-90 mean) for 2026 to be the hottest year on record, exceeding 2025 (see Fig 6, below). Since the average annual CET now is about 1C higher than over the period 1961-90 (Fig 6, again), and with July already looking to be another hot month in England, it’s at least 50:50 that 2026 will be another record hot year in the CET, with scope for breaking the record by a significant margin.

Fig 6 Mean annual CET graph, created by Tim Joslin from Met Office data

Modification history:

2/8/26: The scale in Fig 5 was incorrect. Fixed and replaced image.