This summer, London experienced a higher percentage of people dying prematurely due to high temperatures than anywhere else in England. A tragic situation that exposes the capital and will not just right itself.   

It leaves us searching, as nature writer Barry Lopez put it, for the boats we forgot to build. 

The space between buildings is distributed overwhelmingly in favour of cars and around 8,000 hectares of central London is dedicated to parking. Heat absorbed by hard surfaces through the day then later released generates an urban heat island effect that can raise local temperatures by seven degrees.  

Shade from tree canopy can do the heavy lifting when it comes to bringing down temperatures. But when it comes to tree canopy cover, London ranks 565th out of 767 cities worldwide, according to analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.  

Of course, those boats that we forgot matter more to some than others. The most affluent neighbourhoods in the UK have over 50% more tree cover than the least affluent neighbourhoods. This disparity is vastly greater in London. Leafier boroughs like Barnet, Camden, and Richmond-upon-Thames boast tree cover rates exceeding 26%, whereas boroughs like Barking and Dagenham, Newham, and Tower Hamlets, London’s poorest, drop to between 6% and 12%. 

This inequity continues with more than half of Londoners living further than the recommended 400-metre guideline from public green space. This distance matters because it is linked to lower air quality and greater danger from surface water flooding. There are real health benefits for people in disadvantaged groups who are given decent access to quality green space. It encourages exercise and reduces stress. Having pleasant space to meet and socialise helps people to build relationships and networks, reducing loneliness and isolation. It eases the strain on local NHS services. Improving access to great space is an important tool in building a fairer society.  

London is mandated to deliver 88,000 new homes annually over the next decade. Every new development will need to directly mitigate the issues facing us, from climate impacts to shrinking public space.  

Yet new homes in London already have significantly less park space nearby than mid-20th-century neighbourhoods, and as the city continues to densify on brownfield land, there will be no space for large new parks, woodlands or wetlands. While the GLA requires major new developments to include a specific ratio of green infrastructure, to strengthen the city’s climate resilience, this comes under pressure from competing demands such as site layouts and financial viability. It seems that even the boats we do remember to build are being scuppered. 

The time has come to retrofit existing spaces, turning streets and car parks into linear forests and places of green sanctuary where they are most needed. The London Green Infrastructure Framework (LGIF) looks at what people need and where, by layering socio-economic data with environmental stressors. It identifies where the intersection of poverty and a deficit of natural systems could result in lethal conditions. This is informing the delivery of current strategy like increasing tree canopy cover by 10% by 2050.  

The LGIF represents a kind of urban acupuncture, scientifically pinpointing where positive social and ecological change can be secured, and deploying targeted design interventions. The architect and former Mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, Jamie Lerner, first popularised urban acupuncture when he applied it to transform abandoned spaces. But it has also proven to be an adaptable framework for planning strategies designed to help a city heal. LGIF gives the approach bite by providing the evidence.  

Bold reimagining is needed, to find the ways in which all this growth can work to make London a healthier, more resilient and more liveable city.  

If we don’t act now, then as Gareth Redmond-King, Head of International Programme at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, put it, “this hot and dangerous summer will be one of the coolest of the rest of our lives”.  

London – cool in so many ways – now needs to be cool in every way.