This is a website about staying dry, which makes it a website about weather, which means it also has to deal with the other thing London is spectacularly unequipped for.
12 August 2026 · 3 min read
Everything on this site is usually about rain. That is the premise, it is in the name, and it has served us well.
But the honest version of the premise is that London is a city with no idea what to do about weather of any kind. It is built out of brick that holds heat like a storage radiator, served by a tube line that has been quietly getting warmer since 1900, and populated by people who respond to twenty-eight degrees by removing their shoes on public transport.
So when the forecast goes the other way, the same instinct applies. Get indoors. Find somewhere that was built cold, or has to be kept cold for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and take advantage.
Here are seven.
Housed in a Victorian ice warehouse, with an actual ice well sunk into the ground beneath it. They used to ship ice from Norway and store it here, in a giant brick pit, through the London summer.
I want to be clear that I am not recommending this ironically. It is a genuinely interesting little museum about the canals, and it also happens to be a building whose entire original purpose was refusing to let things get warm. On the right afternoon that is not a coincidence you should waste.
An ice rink, in Bayswater, with a bowling alley and a diner stacked on top of it.
There is no cleverness required here. It is an ice rink. It is cold because it has to be, all year round, regardless of what the sky is doing. You can be extremely bad at skating and still benefit from the ambient temperature, which is the position I take.
Free, enormous, and climate controlled to within a degree because the things inside it are irreplaceable and the things inside you are not.
That is the trick with the British Library. The air conditioning is not for your comfort, it is for the manuscripts, and manuscripts have far better representation than the public do. You get to sit in it anyway. Bring a laptop, look purposeful, stay four hours.
A small museum in Rotherhithe attached to the Thames Tunnel, including the underground chamber where the whole thing started.
Underground is the entire proposition. Whatever the surface is doing, a Victorian engineering shaft is doing something several degrees more sensible. It is also a properly good story: the first tunnel dug under a navigable river anywhere in the world, which flooded repeatedly and nearly killed everyone involved.
Dark, cool, and full of things that would die if it were not.
Aquariums are the only attraction in London where low temperature is a legal requirement rather than a courtesy. It is not cheap, and on a Saturday it is heaving, but it is dim and chilled and there is a tunnel with sharks over your head, which beats standing on a platform at Oxford Circus.
Twelve pounds, central, air conditioned, and showing something excellent that came out thirty years ago.
The cinema is the oldest heat strategy there is and it has never stopped working. Two hours in the dark, nobody expects anything of you, and the building has a commercial interest in not cooking its customers. Check the listings before you go, because the programming is the best in London and it changes constantly.
Free, indoors, and consisting largely of enormous screens in a dark room by Tottenham Court Road.
It costs nothing, you can walk straight in off the street, and you can stay as long as you like. On a day when every other free option involves a park with no shade, being able to stand in a cold dark box watching something enormous move about is worth knowing.
London does heat badly for the same reason it does rain badly: the city was designed for a climate it no longer reliably has, by people who assumed the answer was a heavier coat.
The buildings that cope are the ones that had to be cold for some other reason entirely. Ice wells, rinks, archives, tunnels, tanks. Nobody built any of them for your comfort in August, which is exactly why they work.