It’s the beginning 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 alley-like 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 note sent through back at the station — but there’s always a particular sense of urgency when it’s a job inside the government security zone, and the 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 down to let a man wearing AirPods cross the street in front of us. Working in central London has always posed a challenge for emergency service workers like him and his team of firefighters, but noise cancelling headphone-wearers and traffic at gridlock have become increasingly common causes for delays in recent years. With national staff numbers at their lowest in over 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.
