Homesick: What happens when London's affordability crisis meets the climate crisis?

What It Covers

Journalist Peter Apps, author of *Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It*, examines how four decades of housing financialization have eroded London's social fabric, and how three accelerating climate threats — flooding, overheating, and wildfire — will collide with that existing precarity to devastating effect.

Key Questions Answered

• •Demographic displacement: London's falling poverty rate is a misleading statistic — Trust for London data reveals it reflects poorer residents leaving the city, not reduced poverty. Families exit fastest, triggering school closures and critical key-worker shortages across teaching, healthcare, and transport sectors, hollowing out the mixed-income character London historically maintained.
• •Surface water flooding: London's number-one risk on the city's official risk register — ranked above terrorism — is localized flash flooding from extreme rainfall overwhelming Victorian drainage. Basement flat residents face the highest mortality risk, with expert estimates of 40+ deaths in a single overnight event, yet no targeted public awareness campaign currently exists.
• •Thames Barrier vulnerability: Built in the 1980s for a 70-year lifespan, the Thames Barrier is operating far more frequently than designers projected, accelerating wear beyond replacement timelines. A worst-case East Coast storm surge combined with heavy rainfall could overtop or fail the barrier, flooding millions of homes across London's entire tributary river network.
• •Overheating in post-1990s flats: Roughly 25 years of London flat construction predates 2022's Part O overheating regulations. Common compounding factors include excessive glazing, single-aspect layouts, and district heating systems operating at as low as 15% efficiency — leaking waste heat year-round into buildings. Renters and leaseholders lack the legal standing or financial means to install remedial measures like external shutters.
• •Wildfire-urban interface: Wanstead Flats in East London has burned three times in three years. Research identifies a statistically clear "fire wave" threshold — temperatures above a set point combined with humidity below a set point — that reliably predicts urban grassland ignition. This predictability makes targeted public barbecue and open-flame bans on high-risk days a low-cost, actionable prevention tool.