Faversham UPDATE – The Met Office up to its old tricks again?

Image Courtesy myself on 12th July 2025.

On 10th August 2003 Faversham set the UK national highest record at the time of 38.5°C and still holds the highest ever August temperature record. However, as I pointed out in my original review this reading was widely disputed by none other than Royal Meteorological Society grandees Philip Eden and Stephen Burt with the “locals” knowing of other “actions by persons unknown”. Faversham, however, has more tricks up its sleeve than that.

Trevor Harley is Emeritus chair of cognitive psychology at the University of Dundee, he is also a very keen meteorologist. He produced a list of the hottest days of each year since 1900. This is what the section from 2003 to 2010 looks like.

Note that not only did Trevor express his concerns about the accuracy of that 2003 reading in common with virtually all reputable meteorologists but what is also of interest is that 2010 reading of 31.7°C at Gravesend on 9th July……..why? Well on that same date Faversham recorded 32.7°C so what is going on here?

MetJam also produces a list of the hottest days of each year going back to 1875. Their entry for 2010 also looks like this:

But then they add the following very important note.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that meteorologists are taking readings from Faversham:Brogdale with an exceptionally large pinch of salt except, of course, those at the Met Office who archived a suspect reading regardless of what anyone else may be concerned about

Fast forwarding to 2025 and the Met office is again trumpeting Faversham which always seems to oblige.

Faversham is a manual reporting station at the National Fruit Farm collection under the curation of the only UK University with a dedicated meteorology department and principle training/recruitment centre for the Met Office – Reading University. The Brogdale site is open to the public at times for a modest fee and is something of a tourist attraction with a miniature steam railway and guided tours of the orchards. It is nowhere near a natural environment with extensive windbreak hedging around the site to deliberately create a favorable microclimate. The hedging is in places extremely high, particularly in front of the Stevenson screen where it is over a measured 6 metres high.

The darkened patch in the foreground marks a tunnel through the hedge to the PYO cherries section and is well above head height. This somewhat dodgy image is also courtesy of me when inspecting the site. For anyone let alone the Met Office or Reading University to suggest this environment represents anything other than a deliberately engineered artificial environment is absurd.

But even this is not the main issue. Going back to that 2003 imagery in my original report and supplied to the RMETs by the Met Office itself, there was extensive building material around the Screen including pallets, rubble, piles of earth and even dark sub-base. Well, in the last few weeks the children’s play area alongside the screen enclosure has been redeveloped with extensive earth works and black rubber chippings for soft landings around the climbing areas. This is an educational area where “environmental” school trips regularly feature. The Screen sits between the play area on one side and the mock up hands on “play” weather station on the other. The improvement works are not quite finished and those “jumbo bags” in the headline are full of more black rubber chippings to be spread around. Just like 2003 the site is more akin to a building site than a weather station.

What is even more absurd is that this obviously “proves” there is no such thing as the London Urban Heat island effect – doesn’t it? It must do because whilst the Met Office had originally announced London St James’s Park (an automatic site reporting in real time) as the hottest reading at 34.7°C , Faversham allegedly beat that by 1.1°C – so much for that 5°C extra urban heat. Everyone knows Faversham is hotter than central London right?…….except the locals in the Faversham area.

What further add insult to all this is that in central urban Faversham there is a private weather station that continuously reports hourly to the Met Office Weather Observations Website. This PWS is actually rather poor in the town centre urban area and is only well correlated to the Met office site by running consistently hotter and significantly so. What does the official Met office website for the 1st July show that site as reading?

Probably just a coincidence (?) that it inexplicably went offline on that exact day and only started registering again 4 days later. So what about the nearest other good quality Met office weather station, the Class 1 East Malling site. As as an automatic station it did obviously not even trouble the St James’s Park reading and in fact recorded a maximum just shy of 2°C cooler than Faversham.

What does all this amount to? Faversham is a very poor quality officially acknowledged (Class 4 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 2 °C). Senior RMETs members do not trust its accuracy nor do the majority of meteorologists to such an extent that they now openly ignore and invalidate its “records”. It is prone to activities by “persons unknown” and in the latest bizarrely out of kilter reading was subject to extensive site construction works when access to that area was restricted.

Draw your own conclusions but for me this is yet more Weapons Grade Gaslighting marking the Death of Met Office Credibility

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/07/14/faversham-update-the-met-office-up-to-its-old-tricks-again/