So I have been doing a bit more work looking at the number of 30C days in 1976. Impossible to get an accurate position because daily maximums are not publicly available. The daily weather summary from that time only lists a small number of stations and only rounds data to the nearest whole degree. The monthly weather report has a large list of stations and gives data to the nearest tenth of a degree. But it only gives the maximum for the month.
I have expanded my list and included those days where a station listed in the daily weather summary reached at least 29C. Based on other dates where we do have specific maximum figures, it is not unusual for the maximum to be 2C or more higher than any figure recorded at a station in the daily weather summary. So it is likely that most days where a figure of 29C is listed in the daily weather summary will have seen 30C somewhere in the UK at an official station. Possibly not all but then there could be some days where the highest temperature in the summary was only 28C but the maximum somewhere in the UK was above 30C.
So my best estimate is that there were about 28 days in 1976 that reached 30C.
If we look at 2018 we have seen 23 days so far. Assuming today, tomorrow and Tuesday reach 30C, which seems very likely, we will be up to 26 and just 2 short of 1976.
We have only had 8 consecutive days above 30C compared to a run of 16 in 1976. However, had 4th July reached 30C we would have had a run of 15 days. We still need to see whether any of the manual stations managed 30C on the 4th. Not looking very likely given the current maximum for that day was at Giants Causeway.
The days highlighted in yellow in 1976 represent maximums taken from the daily weather summary. These are not the official maximums for the day which will be higher. As noted above, the daily weather summary at that time only gave data to the nearest whole degree.

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Originally Posted by: Global Warming