The capital's fire crews feel the heat

Wildfires, exploding e-bikes and terror incidents... the work of a firefighter is widening rapidly. As response times reach their longest in a decade, Katie Strick spends 11 hours on the frontline

IT'S the start of one of the hottest September weeks on record and Jon Singleton and his firefighters on the Soho red watch are feeling the heat. We're racing through the streets of Westminster on a blue light call- nothing out of the ordinary, just a fire alarm at the Churchill War Rooms, according to the notes, but there's always a particular sense of urgency when it's a job inside the Government security zone, and protesters and roadworks are hardly helping.

"The other day, it took us 10 minutes to get to a kid who'd been hit by a bus due to roadworks," Singleton, 50, station commander for the London Fire Brigade's (LFB) Soho outpost on Shaftesbury Avenue, tells me as he slows to let a man wearing AirPods cross in front of us. Working in central London has always posed a challenge for him and his team, but noise-cancelling headphone wearers and traffic at gridlock have become increasingly common causes for delay in recent years. With staff numbers at their lowest in a decade and incident numbers up by 25,000 in the year to March, it's no wonder fire service response times in England are at their highest in 10 years.

Singleton and his team race into the War Rooms in their PPE as a crowd of evacuated tourists watch eagerly from the sidelines in St James' Park. Engines always attract attention, so Singleton and his team are used to being on show by now but that doesn't make them any less focused. It's a false alarm in this instance, likely set off by some dust or burnt toast, but as firefighters they've been trained to come to work ready for anything: suspected terror incidents; chemical accidents; body recovery; road traffic collisions; the next Grenfell.