Updated: 2026-09-28
Glasgow has no weather station of its own in the Met Office archive, so the closest long-running measuring point is the station at Paisley (Renfrewshire), sitting at 32 m of altitude, 11.4 km from the city. Its summer records run from 1914 to 2010, and they answer the question directly: the warmest summer in that record, measured by average daily maximum, reached 21.2 °C in 1995. The coldest was 16.9 °C in 1922. Those two figures alone show the range a Glasgow-side summer can deliver.
The single hottest day measured at the station across the whole summer record was 31.0 °C, logged in summer 1975. That is warmer than anything recorded in the following three and a half decades of the series — the next-highest daily peak on the books is 30.0 °C, a value that turns up repeatedly in the record.
The standout summer. 1995 delivered the highest average daily maximum of any summer from 1914 to 2010: 21.2 °C
average daily maximum across June, July and August at Paisley
For comparison, the coolest summer average in the same record was 16.9 °C in 1922 — the gap between a memorable summer and a washout at this station is about four degrees of average daytime peak.
The average daily maximum is the workhorse figure here. It smooths out the odd heat spike and shows what a typical summer afternoon felt like across the whole three-month season. At Paisley, summers in the 17 °C range were common in the 1920s — 1922 at 16.9 °C, 1924 at 17.2 °C, 1928 at 17.1 °C. Cool summers kept appearing through the middle of the century too: 1954 at 17.2 °C, 1965 at 17.4 °C, 1985 at 17.2 °C.
Against that, a cluster of notably warm summers sits in the later part of the record. 1975 reached 20.2 °C average daily maximum, 1976 came in at 20.9 °C, 1995 at 21.2 °C, and 2003 and 2006 both landed at 20.6 °C. The 1920s and 1930s also produced warm summers — 1925 at 20.1 °C, 1926 at 20.0 °C, 1933 at 20.7 °C — so the "summers were better when I was young" feeling depends on which decade you grew up in.
The station that recorded the highest summer average daily maximum across the network during the same broad era was Heathrow (Greater London) at 22.3 °C over 78 summers of data. Northolt, also in Greater London, followed at 22.2 °C across 68 summers. In Suffolk, Santon Downham registered 22.1 °C across 37 summers and Cavendish 22.0 °C across 49 summers. London St James's Park, with the longest record in this group at 110 summers, averaged 21.9 °C.
Set the Paisley summer record against those numbers and the gap is real but not enormous by UK standards: the warmest summers in Greater London and East Anglia sit a little above the best Paisley has managed, while the typical Paisley summer sits well below the London average. That is the pattern a west-of-Scotland location would expect — cooler and more changeable than the south-east, but capable of matching or beating it on individual hot days.
If you remember one blazing afternoon, the daily maximum column is where to look. The highest figure in the whole summer record is 31.0 °C, measured in summer 1975. Several other summers produced individual days of 30.0 °C: 1926, 1933, 1934, 1950 and 1983 each recorded a peak of 30.0 °C. In 1995 the season's highest single day reached 29.6 °C, and in 1939 and 1940 the peak was 29.4 °C. These are the stand-out afternoons rather than the shape of the season as a whole.
The full year-by-year table below lists the average daily maximum and the season's highest daily maximum for each summer from 1914 to 2010. Years excluded for incomplete data are 1917 and 2011; the table covers complete summers only.
The chart shows the complete annual series. The table lists the most notable years; the full series comes from Met Office.
| Year | Summer average daily maximum (°C) | Highest daily maximum (°C) |
|---|---|---|
| 1926 | 20.0 | 30.0 |
| 1933 | 20.7 | 30.0 |
| 1934 | 19.8 | 30.0 |
| 1950 | 18.8 | 30.0 |
| 1964 | 17.4 | 22.2 |
| 1975 | 20.2 | 31.0 |
| 1977 | 19.4 | 30.0 |
It depends entirely on the year you are remembering. The Paisley record from 1914 to 2010 shows warm summers scattered right across the century: 1925, 1926, 1933, 1949, 1955, 1976, 1995, 2003 and 2006 all reached or passed an average daily maximum of 20.0 °C. It also shows cold ones in every era: 1922 at 16.9 °C, 1954 at 17.2 °C, 1985 at 17.2 °C, 1998 at 17.6 °C. There is no single trend line of declining summers in these figures — the mix of memorable and miserable seasons runs the full length of the record.
The blunt answer for anyone remembering a Glasgow summer from decades back: the best average summer result of the whole series came in 1995 at 21.2 °C, and the hottest single day came in 1975 at 31.0 °C. If your memory is of a summer that hit the high twenties or thirty, it is probably one of those two years or the handful of others detailed above.
Source: Met Office MIDAS archive — Paisley station, Renfrewshire, 1914–2010. Summer figures cover June to August. Data released under the Open Government Licence.
HistoClima Tools: discover the weather on the day you were born, your wedding day, or your birthday-week statistics.
AI-assisted content from official Met Office data, automatically verified. 🤖 IA-assisted content · Art. 50 EU AI Act
© 2026 HistoClima · data: Met Office (OGL v3.0) · not affiliated with Met Office · citation permitted with source.