It will end on Wednesday when the cooler wind and rain will travel down the country and return Britain to around 54F (12C), below average temperatures for this time of year.

However in the long term, the “heatwave researchers” at the University of Nottingham “warned that while Indian summers could become more common, heatwaves in the future could become even hotter.”

Dr Simon Gosling, who led the research, ran climate models in different parts of the world to predict what the future might look like, and the impact on human health.

He found that in all countries it was "very likely" that heatwaves would become longer and hotter.

And while he said it is possible people may acclimatise to the hotter temperatures, he still predicted six times as many heat-related deaths each year.

"The European heatwave of 2003 had a devastating effect on human health. The extremely high temperatures have been estimated to have caused over 35,000 deaths across the continent.

"Climate change predictions indicate that events such as this heatwave could occur more often in the future and that future heatwaves could be even more extreme. Moreover, there is evidence that towards the end of this century, every summer in Europe could be as hot as the summer of 2003,” he said.

Dr Pete Inness, a meteorologist at the University of Reading, emphasised that the recent warm weather was not caused by climate change alone.

He said the long term forecasts predict weather will be warmer in Britain, although from year to year there will be variations caused by changes in the weather system around the world.

“The natural variability in the UK weather is large, and so one warm autumn or cold summer does not either prove or disprove climate change. Climate change is all about long term trends, which are hard to detect in a weather record which has very large natural variability.”

Michael Dukes, a forecaster at the Meteogroup, pointed out that most of the north of the country has suffered rain during the recent ‘heatwave’ and forecast showers will continue in the north.

Later in the week, he said the cool weather will spread down the country and in the north it will get even colder, with possible snow on the hills.

“People will quickly grab their winter coats and think about turning on the heating,” he said. “Autumn will really be here."