Police officers searching for swimmers who went missing during the UK’s heatwave have found two bodies.
A body was recovered on Tuesday evening in the search for a man in his 20s from Wiltshire, who had gone missing in the lake at Cotswold Water Park, Gloucestershire Constabulary said.
On Wednesday morning, Scotland Yard said officers searching for a man last seen swimming in the River Thames at Shadwell Basin on Tuesday had recovered the body of a 23-year-old man, the Press Association reports.
He had been swimming with friends when he did not resurface, police said.
The deaths are not being treated as suspicious, with searches continuing to locate the other male also believed to be missing in the Thames.
Soaring temperatures in the capital on Tuesday meant thousands of people headed to the river to cool down.
Temperatures across England exceeded 30C (86F) on Tuesday, with forecasters predicting even hotter temperatures on Wednesday.
“Quite a lot of places are back up to 23 or 24 degrees already (at 5am),” Met Office meteorologist Emma Smith said.
“It’s normally 13 or 14 degrees at this time of year, so that’s 10 degrees above average.”
It will get to 35 degrees on Wednesday, with a small chance it will get to 36C,” she added.
The highest overnight average temperature ever seen in the UK was 23.3C (73.94F) in July 1948.
Smith said there is a possibility this will be beaten on Thursday night into Friday.
Temperatures in London are expected to reach 38C (100.4F) on Thursday, which would pass the current record for a day in July – 36.7C (98.1F) – recorded at Heathrow Airport in 2015.
The Met Office said there is a 40% chance the UK temperature record of 38.5C (101.3F), which was recorded in Faversham, Kent, in August 2003, will be exceeded.