London Kensington House Hotel and August Temperature

To some degree ( no pun intended ) , it depends on your tolerance to heat , mine is low during the warm months . One thing to consider is that buildings act as heat sinks . On a warm day a building absorbs heat and may give it up slowly in the eveming even though the outside temperature has dropped significantly . Also , even an open window may be of limited help if there is no way to establish cross ventilation . For me , August is a time of year when I want AC , anywhere .

I haven't been to London recently. In the pre-Global Warming days, my concern in London was being cold and wet, not too hot, but I'm a bit worried about my upcoming trip there is August.

One thing to keep in mind is that window screens are so rare in Europe as to be nonexistent, and noise can be more of an issue with windows open. Definitely travel with some earplugs.

If you want to take a look at day-by-day actual temperatures in London rather than monthly averages, you can find historical data going back about 20 years on wunderground.com. Take a look at the temp. graphs for August 2016, August 2015, etc.

I've spent quite a bit of time in London during the month of August and have experienced everything from rain, clouds, and cool temperatures to sweltering, miserable heat. You won't really know until the weather forecasts are made a week or two before you travel.

Last August, my husband and I spent 23 days in London and 8 nights in the Cotswolds. The weather in London was miserably hot. We spent a lot of afternoons going back to the Conrad St. James, as it was air-conditioned. There was definitely a heat wave going on.

Hotels are often considerably stuffier without A/C than private houses, especially modern ones as they are well insulated - kind of the reverse of what you want. You don't say what end of August you are considering - temperatures at the front end can easily reach in excess of 90F in the shade, and would be hotter in rooms exposed to sunlight. The chance does reduce as the year goes on but the latest day in London with a temperature over 90F is 19 September - way back in 1926.

Of course you could come in a cool rainy summer, but who knows.

Hard to predict the weather day to day, let alone months in advance. It is what it is and could be anything from snow to melting and everything in between. The UK is unique in the world in being below the covergence of four weather systems, only one of which is favourable, hence the reputation for bad weather. All that being said, it is rare that we get extremes of anything, but it can happen. Homes almost never have AC, we just open the windows.

Because really hot weather is so rare in the UK, we don't really hold with air conditioning as a concept. We sort of enjoy/embrace/suffer the sweltering temperatures inside & out knowing that it won't last. Newspapers run front page stories about heatwaves and switch suddenly to Fahrenheit (because it's way more exciting talking about temperatures approaching 100 than somewhere in the 30s); we get fans out and open windows and kind of revel in the stickiness, knowing it'll only last a few days.

Which is fine for those of us used to it, but if your first trip to London happens to coincide with one of those fairly rare heatwaves then it could be pretty miserable. Here in London we're used to sleeping with the windows open and are puzzled when Americans moan about the noise (it's London! Of course it's noisy!) or the lack of screens (it's only a few moths & bugs getting in; don't worry about it!)

So while aircon isn't always necessary, if the above sounds like your idea of hell, find yourself a purpose-built modern hotel with air conditioning. What you might have trouble finding is a "quaint" traditional budget London hotel with aircon. So the choice is yours....

(Nb: top choice for a budget hotel with aircon would be one of the newer Premier Inns - the Waterloo one is air conditioned and in a great location.)