Updated: 2026-07-31
The nearest official weather measurement point to Birmingham is the Met Office station at Coton-in-the-Elms, Derbyshire, located at 85 metres above sea level, about 32.6 km away. These are its historical records. Local conditions in Birmingham itself — city centre heat, proximity to the River Tame, or the higher ground of the Lickey Hills — can make actual temperatures differ from those measured here, but this station is the closest continuous reference we have for the region.
In the full series from 1991 to 2025, extreme heat — defined here as a daily maximum temperature reaching 35°C or more — has been a rare event at the Coton-in-the-Elms station. The year 2022 stands alone with 2 such days. For over three decades of records, this is the only year in which the 35°C threshold was crossed at all. Every other year in the top-five list for high counts shows 0 days of extreme heat, with the highest daily maximum in those years ranging from 25.5°C in 1993 to 32.5°C in 1995.
To put this in context: the hottest day ever recorded at this station reached 38.9°C, on 19 July 2022 — the same year that produced both extreme-heat days. So the entire extreme-heat history of this station, across 35 years of observations, is concentrated into a single summer week. Before 2022, no day had reached 35°C here since records began in 1991.
The table below shows the five years with the most days above 35°C and the five years with the fewest (or none). The full series spans 1 March 1991 to 31 December 2025.
| Year | Days ≥35°C | Annual max temp (°C) |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2 | 38.9 |
| 1991 | 0 | 27.9 |
| 1992 | 0 | 27.8 |
| 1993 | 0 | 25.5 |
| 1994 | 0 | 29.9 |
| 1995 | 0 | 32.5 |
Breaking the series down by decade shows how unusual the 2020s look so far. The average annual number of extreme-heat days was 0.0 in the 1990s, 0.0 in the 2000s, and 0.0 in the 2010s. In the 2020s — counting only the partial years up to 2025 — that average has risen to 0.3 days per year. That single number, 0.3, reflects the two days in 2022 spread across the six years of the decade so far. It is a small figure, but it is the first time the average has moved off zero since the station began observing.
For anyone planning outdoor events in the Birmingham area, the practical reading of these records is straightforward: a day above 35°C is not part of the normal summer experience here. It has happened exactly once in 35 years — in July 2022 — and it happened twice in that one week. The years that come closest without crossing the threshold, like 1995 with a peak of 32.5°C, show that hot weather does arrive, but the extreme threshold of 35°C has almost always remained out of reach.
What these numbers cannot tell you is what Birmingham itself felt like during those July 2022 days. Urban surfaces, traffic, and building density typically add extra warmth in a city centre compared with the rural Derbyshire station. But for a long-term, consistent measure of how often extreme heat reaches this part of England, Coton-in-the-Elms is the reference point — and its answer is: rarely, so far, and only in the most recent years of the record.
Source: Met Office station at Coton-in-the-Elms, Derbyshire. Period: 1991–2025.
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© 2026 HistoClima · data: Met Office (OGL v3.0) · not affiliated with Met Office · citation permitted with source.