Sick of the heatwave? This interactive app shows you where you can cool down near you
Putting AC in actually useful...
London doesn’t really do anything by halves: Arsenal celebrations, nights out, and, as shown by the last week, summer. Or more specifically, heatwaves. The last few days have seen Londoners sprawled like scattered shrimps across every conceivable inch of green space, and every single corner store completely stripped of Factor 50, aloe, and disposable barbecues. After four days of hawt weather, in true British style, we’re all already complaining about it. If you thought working from home was the solution to keeping cool (namely: able to work in trunks, on a balcony, with an ice cream, and have a cheeky lido swim at lunch) only to realise you have zero air conditioning, a broken fan, and three housemates who thought the same, then this new interactive map showing Londoners where they can best cool off might be your new wingman.
Catchily named Where’s Cool, the new app has created a map that shows which cafes, bars, and restaurants near you have air con. Consider your prayers literally answered. According to the team behind the app, when the UK gets caught in a heatwave, where do you go? Well, they couldn’t find a map of those places, so they built one.
As the map points out, there are over 280,000 pubs, cafes, restaurants and bars in England and Wales - only around 8,000 (3%) of them are confirmed to have air conditioning, so your odds of striking the frozen jackpot are rather slim if you roll the dice and just wander in somewhere.
Thanks to the sheer volume of pubs, cafes, restaurants and other public spots, a lot of the places on the map have ‘unconfirmed AC status’, where the map needs punters to help close the gaps and confirm if there’s AC or not. Luckily, though, there’s a useful toggle which you can set so you only see nearby locations with confirmed AC.
In terms of how they actually collected the data, it consisted of a fair bit of sleuthing from the self-confessed data nerds at Sabot, the engineers behind the app. Every food business in England and Wales is legally required to register with the FSA's Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, so to confirm the AC status, they cross-referenced this with the public MHCLG Energy Performance Certificate dataset. Where a venue's EPC said it had cooling, they marked it confirmed. For everything else, it’s the trusty - if slightly overheated - public who are helping to solve that riddle, inputting data to the app to let them know if a venue has AC or not. If a couple of people agree, the map is updated.
Thomas Chivers, Where's Cool creator said:
“As a ginger man, the heatwave this week has been the undoing of me. Unfortunately, working out of my sweatbox flat wasn't an option and finding a reliable cafe with AC wasn't as straightforward as I thought it was.
When doing the research, I managed to find a data source that shows confirmed venues that actually have air con. When I told this to some remote working friends they asked if I could create a map so they could benefit as well. It made too much sense not to share it around!”
You can find the app at wherescool.uk.
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