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

“I t’s taken away people’s ability to stay in a place and to gain some sense of ownership and belonging," says journalist Peter Apps, speaking about the housing affordability crisis in the capital.

Having written about housing for most of his career, Apps’ latest book, Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It chronicles 40 years of gentrification and the resulting changes to the demographics, culture and very nature of the city. 

In that time, London has gone from a place where a teacher can afford to buy a house to a city so expensive that key workers are forced to move out of London and commute back in. It’s a place where primary schools are closing in boroughs once heaving with children that just a decade ago had waiting lists for school places.  

"What has been lost is a sense of permanence and a sense of security that London used to offer to working class and lower-and-middle income people and now doesn’t. It’s a struggle to find somewhere to stay, you probably don’t know the people around you, and that bond of being part of a rooted community isn’t available to people anymore," says Apps. "The key driver is housing."

In the book, Apps also looks ahead 40 years and asks what impact the dangers of climate change will have on London’s precarious housing market. Not only will flooding and overheating worsen inequality – between those who can get flood insurance or install air conditioning and those who can’t – the lack of social cohesion in the capital will also endanger lives. 

"London has flooded before. It went through the Blitz. The thing that gets us through disasters is community," says Apps. "The lack of a spiritual sense of home will make it harder to be resilient."

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In its final chapters, the book delves into three major threats to London from climate change: wildfire, overheating and flooding.

Apps has some expertise on fires, having written an award-winning book on the Grenfell disaster. He says that many fires happen on the hottest days of the year. London is a green and verdant city, but when all that grass and vegetation is dry, wildfire becomes a real and growing risk to homes. 

The poor quality of housing also puts people at risk of overheating during heatwaves. But it’s flooding that poses the number one risk to London – both from its rivers and sudden deluges that overwhelm its sewers. 

There’s the river – "If there was an east coast storm surge at a time of heavy rainfall, that can and has in the past overwhelmed the Thames... There is the chance for a flood to overtop the Thames Barrier or for the barrier to fail, and the consequences of that would be utterly apocalyptic." 

But it’s hard rain that can very quickly and unpredictably cause flooding anywhere in the city: "The drains back up, the street floods and it gets into people’s properties," says Apps.

"There is a very direct life risk. The current working estimate is that a worst-case scenario of a flood in the middle of the night in an area with lots of basement flats would cost 40 lives in London and I’ve spoken to experts who think the number would be considerably higher than that." 

"There is almost certainly a link between who is living in a basement flat and poverty," adds Apps, underlining how housing affordability intersects with climate risk.

"There is no public awareness of this risk. There’s probably a lot of people who live in basements and are unaware of the risk they would be in if there was a very sudden surface-water flooding event. Just understanding that risk would be a start. Public awareness could save lives." 

Apps believes all these stories are not just about London, but also serve as a warning to other cities. "London is a good case study about what’s also happening in Paris, San Francisco, Sydney. There’s a global story here about where we’re living, and what happens when we can’t afford to live in the places we have to in order to work.”

In way, the book is a eulogy for a London that is vanishing. “I’m a Londoner born-and-raised as well as living in the city now," says Apps. "Over the span of my life has been a real period of change in terms of housing. You can sometimes forget that the past is actually quite close – this wasn’t always the way London was.”