This Photo Makes London Look Like California Amid the Summer Drought

Features
Matt Growcoot
An aerial view of a stone church with a tall spire situated on a large, dry, grassy field with a line of parked cars along the road.
An aerial image showing a church near London that looks more like a desert scene than England.

It looks like an image taken on the semi-arid landscape of southern California, but this remarkable news photo, showing scorched grass, was actually taken in London.

The U.K. experienced record low rainfall and high temperatures in July, and half of the country is estimated to be in drought.

The remarkable photo taken on a drone by Getty Images photographer Justin Tallis shows All Saints Church in Blackheath, a neighborhood in south-east London.

There is almost nothing in the vegetation that says “Britain”, a country that poet William Blake dubbed a “green and pleasant land.”

All Saints Church sits on Blackheath Common, a 270-acre public space that is typically lush and leafy. It’s famous for being the starting point for the annual London Marathon. But without the London skyline of Canary Wharf in the background, the scene could pass for a semi-rural Southern California location.

X users commented that the photo taken by Tallis on July 29 looks more like California or Western Australia. Someone even compared it to the famous Guns N’ Roses November Rain video when Slash plays a guitar solo outside of a desert church. The 1992 music video was filmed near Galisteo, New Mexico.

It’s an excellent photo that showcases the work of news photographers who are out each day taking images that illustrate current events. Visualizing a drought could be as simple as taking a photo of yellow grass, but by framing All Saints Church in such a way that it sparks people’s imaginations, it gets readers talking about the extent of the dry weather.

There have been three official heatwaves in the U.K. this summer. Seven regions have officially been deemed to be in drought by the Environmental Agency.

Across the English Channel, France and Spain have faced even hotter temperatures that have sparked wildfires. France’s Gironde region suffered the country’s largest wildfire since 1949, while a forest fire in Spain’s Almeria region killed 14 people.

Image creditsPhotograph by Justin Tallis / Getty Images

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