From the surface of the sun, about 93 million miles away, to a dozen paving stones on Eastcheap, the hotspot was heating up nicely. At lunchtime, bareheaded north Europeans poured from their air con offices to experience the blistering heat, squinted into the Biblical light, and then photographed the phenomena with their smartphones. Helios was having a blast. I started my psychogeographic route along the celestial pathway and photographed from the western side at 10.30am to the eastern end 4 hours later. The Indian summer was already delaying the late autumn, spoiling Londoners for a further two weeks, when news came through of a strange event: An intensity of solar rays, reflected from the concave plate glass windows of one of the capital’s newest skyscrapers known as the Walkie-talkie, and focussing on the street below in the heart of the capital’s financial district. A Jaguar owner returned to melted trim and wing mirror and a cyclist found his saddle smouldering. Tarmac turned to soft putty and thermometers produced from building atria registered a suffocating 50° and up to to 66° C (144°F) – possibly the hottest place on the earth’s surface ever recorded. En route to buy their sushi, a fraction of the 386 billion billion megaWatts of solar energy scorched the Londoners’ foreheads but somehow, the Walkie Talkie’s developer Land Securities admitted his modelling had failed to predict this event. Its Uruguayan designer Rafael Viñoly’s also shirked any blame: “Architects aren’t architects any more,” he complained. “One of the problems that happens in this town is the superabundance of consultants and sub consultants that dilute the responsibility of the designers until you don’t know where you are.” He also underestimated how sunny this metropolis can be, although skulking in the shadows then crouching in the inferno was a corporate official wearing grey armed with an industrial thermometer – clearly taking regular readings, and very loathe to divulging his motives: “I won’t say anything, I’m working.” So bright were the multiples of suns in the glass (it was difficult and foolish to decide exactly how many though 4 seems a good number) that sunglasses proved ineffective, as if an eclipse was luring the over-curious into burning their retinas. As qualified as the suits may be, in quantitative easing perhaps, under the glare they reverted to adolescence. Eggs and Teflon frying pans appeared and while there was a certain degree of sizzling, few realised that the hottest zone was on the periphery of the brightest light. In a moment of overheated excitement, German TV crew cracked their own yolk on the boot of a Mercedes, too hot to touch, until stopped and questioned by police about criminal damage. If there were wider health & safety issues, no officials in hi-vis and hard hats were present to bother about the possibilities of spontaneous combustion. (More text available).

The last week of February 2019 was labled by the Met Office, as the warmest February on record. London's average for the second month is 7°C yet here we were with a high of 20.6. UK weather exactly 12 months previously had been icy but temperatures this year had people happily scratching their heads. Was it Climate Change or an anomaly? It hardly seemed to matter to Brexit-battle-weary Brits - it was time bare arms. I decided to revisit the same street corner on successive mornings and record for myself the comings and goings of Mayfair's finest and its passing traffic and trades. The term warm is for me as much as the meteorological event - as warm colour.

The day that the UK reached its hottest day ever: Forty-three-point-three degrees Centigrade.

The third gallery recording the strange behaviour caused by natural phenomena (See Storm Doris about an extremely windy day in the City of London - plus Walkie Talkie Death Ray about the melting of property from unusual heat caused by direct sunlight from a new London skyscraper). Here, Storm Georgina causes local flooding and lunchtime pedestrians in Holborn - once one of London's overground rivers, now lost underground.

Britain's Met Office tells us what the weather forecasts are. Largely they're right - and sometimes, they scare us by exaggerating the risks and get it wrong. Yesterday they predicted that a weather bomb they called Storm Doris (forever called Doris Day after the US goody-two-shoes actress) would hit the British Isles with winds en excess of 75mph. They got it right. I know of a street in the heart of London's financial centre which acts like a wind tunnel - so mid-morning, I went and waited for the storm's mid-day peak when lunchtime office workers would emerge from their sealed buildings - unaware that gusts were already taking hats and shoes away; scaring elderly ladies and blowing cyclists and motorcyclists over in the road. As an event that lasted three hours for me, Doris Day was epic throughout the day in many parts of the country. One person was killed by falling masonry in the Midlands and trees were uprooted, of course. I latch on to natural street phenomena which allow me to sample, during a very brief episodes, the behaviour of city workers enduring disruptions and jeopardies. Images are in date taken order and so follow the 3-hour chronology of Doris Day as it unfolded at that spot in the City. See also 'Along the Solar Path: Heat & Light from the Walkie-talkie Building': http://richardbaker.photoshelter.com/gallery/Along-the-Solar-Path-Heat-Light-from-the-Walkie-talkie-Building/G0000WUJe3AWTIjI

Street Photography on the theme of jeopardies endured by London pedestrians.

I'd just read about a new phenomena that UK researchers of the natural world had been studying. Throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, we have seen the return of wildlife wandering onto the world's empty streets and scientists have been tracking the newly-discovered habitats by animals and creatures, vacated by the stay-at-home human species. They called it 'Anthropause' after the global-scale, temporary slowdown in human activity, likely to have a profound impact on other species. Measuring that impact, they say, will reveal ways in which we can "share our increasingly crowded planet". So that afternoon a swarm of worker bees occupied a short length of Oxford Street. Shoppers dodged the little creatures, grown men yelped. "The people don't understand nature! .. They're harmless if they don't hit them, they're only moving homes!" said a security guard from rural Portugal. But shop workers, whose recently re-opened trinket store had them crawling up the windows, gassed them with fly-killing aerosol. For just twenty minutes, Homo sapien shoppers prevailed that day