  The presence of corners in the computational domain, in general, reduces the
regularity of solutions of parabolic problems and diminishes the convergence
properties of the finite element approximation introducing a so-called
"pollution effect". Standard remedies based on mesh refinement around the
singular corner result in very restrictive stability requirements on the
time-step size when explicit time integration is applied. In this article, we
introduce and analyse the energy-corrected finite element method for parabolic
problems, which works on quasi-uniform meshes, and, based on it, create fast
explicit time discretisation. We illustrate these results with extensive
numerical investigations not only confirming the theoretical results but also
showing the flexibility of the method, which can be applied in the presence of
multiple singular corners and a three-dimensional setting. We also propose a
fast explicit time-stepping scheme based on a piecewise cubic energy-corrected
discretisation in space completed with mass-lumping techniques and numerically
verify its efficiency.
