In a church hall in Peckham, a group of volunteers is arranging folding chairs, filling plastic cups with water and testing the two portable air-conditioning units donated by a local electrical retailer. In a community centre in Hackney, a retired nurse is taking the blood pressure of an elderly man who walked in from a sheltered housing block where the temperature on the top floor has reached 31 degrees. In a library in Croydon, a teenager is helping an 82-year-old woman video-call her daughter in Glasgow, because the heat has made her too dizzy to hold the phone steady.
These are the cooling centres of London, an ad hoc, largely volunteer-run network that has expanded rapidly in response to the Met Office’s extended amber heat warning. What began as a handful of pilot projects during the extreme heat of 2022 has grown into a citywide infrastructure of more than 150 locations, coordinated by borough councils, charities, faith groups and neighbourhood organisations. They are open to anyone, but their primary purpose is to provide relief to those most at risk: the elderly, the isolated, the chronically ill, the homeless.
The model is simple. A public building — a library, a community centre, a place of worship, a leisure centre — opens its doors during the hottest hours of the day, typically from 10am to 6pm. It provides a cool space, free water, light refreshments and, in many cases, basic health monitoring. Volunteers, often recruited through local charities or council databases, staff the centres, offering conversation, reassurance and a watchful eye for anyone showing signs of heat-related illness.
The growth of the network reflects both the increasing frequency of heat events and the enduring strength of London’s community infrastructure. The capital’s network of churches, mosques, temples, community centres and mutual aid groups, forged over decades of immigration, activism and neighbourliness, has proved remarkably adaptable to the demands of a warming climate. In many boroughs, the same organisations that organised food distribution during the pandemic have pivoted to heat response, drawing on established relationships with vulnerable residents and a deep understanding of local geography.
