The Unit­ed King­dom smashed a cen­tu­ry-old tem­per­a­ture record for the sec­ond time in 24 hours on Tues­day as a spring heat wave con­tin­ued to scorch parts of West­ern Eu­rope, trig­ger­ing gov­ern­ment warn­ings about risks to life. Sev­er­al drown­ings were re­port­ed in Britain and France as peo­ple tried to cool down.

A tem­per­a­ture of 35.1 Cel­sius (95.2 Fahren­heit) was record­ed at Lon­don’s Kew Gar­dens, Britain’s Met Of­fice weath­er ser­vice said, break­ing the 34.8 C (94.6 F) record set a day ear­li­er at Kew. The pro­vi­sion­al read­ings smashed the long-stand­ing record of 32.8 C (91.4 F) set in 1922 and matched in 1944.

Lon­don al­so record­ed a rare “trop­i­cal night,” de­fined as one in which the tem­per­a­ture does not fall be­low 20 C (68 F).