London has no single mandatory temperature trigger or support level for rough sleepers during extreme heat, leaving boroughs and outreach teams to interpret city guidance according to local resources, while one charity described temporary accommodation and other provision as a postcode lottery. [1]

That uneven service record advances July 25's warning-versus-outcome account, which treated an advisory population as potential exposure rather than proof that cooling reached households or prevented illness.

The Guardian's bounded reporting follows outreach workers and people including Tom, a pseudonymous man in his 60s, whose accounts identify concrete barriers: carrying possessions and winter clothes, storing medication, limited mobility, stigma, pets, bags, and uncertainty about where cooling spaces exist.

Workers reported distributing water, checking people with health conditions, and directing them toward cooler places, but selected testimony cannot establish how common each barrier is across London, which borough opened which service, who used it, or whether illness or death fell.

The next useful ledger needs borough triggers, cooling and water locations, access rules, referrals, emergency beds, outreach workload, heat illness, mortality, and sustained housing outcomes; until then, generic hydration advice conceals the institutional geography without turning poignant accounts into a citywide prevalence estimate.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago