More than half a million people visited community “warm rooms” to escape freezing homes and escalating poverty during the winter, according to the first audit of the impact of these potent symbols of the UK’s cost of living crisis.
Warm space projects sprang up in their thousands across the UK in the autumn, as charities, libraries and faith groups responded to soaring energy poverty by opening venues to provide cash strapped people with warmth, free food and a cup of tea.
A survey by the Warm Welcome campaign, a UK-wide network of over 4,200 warm spaces, suggests many successfully provided their visitors with a measure of respite from their problems – but not necessarily the problem the projects had planned for.
Most visitors welcomed the warmth; they were struggling financially, and saved money on heating and food, wifi costs and children’s activities.
But while respite from poverty was important, the survey found, it was secondary to warm rooms’ other main if perhaps unforeseen benefit: challenging the social blight of loneliness.
“The biggest difference has been in reducing social isolation,” said one survey respondent. “We found those who were struggling with the cost of living crisis in financial terms didn’t particularly access us - they used the nearby foodbank more. It was the escape from an empty house that people found most gratifying about our warm space.”
The greatest impact of warm rooms, the survey found, was in providing a sense of community and tackling loneliness in a safe and welcoming space. Frequent visitors reported positive improvements in their mental health, social wellbeing, and sense of purpose. “It’s helped me cope with the hard times,” one respondent said.
“Social contact is as important as food and warmth. It is the thing we live for, and if people don’t have it their mental health will suffer. If you get people together, they feel better,” said Nanette Mellors, the chief executive of the Brain Charity in Liverpool, which ran a warm room over the winter
Not all projects were welcomed unquestionably: some warm rooms quickly learned people would not come if they suspected the offer was, as Warm Welcome chief executive David Barclay said, “a place where the poor came to huddle together in winter”.
Some of the most successful warm rooms offered community events – sing-alongs, cabaret, exercise classes, darts and bingo – alongside services such as food, laundry services, haircuts, children’s creches, clothes banks and benefits advice, all for free or cut price, in an accessible, non-judgemental space.
One of the wider lessons of the warm space phenomenon was how it focused attention on both the social value of communal public space, especially in the most economically deprived areas, and the austerity cuts to public spending, which have forced thousands of community centres and libraries to close.
Bruce Leeke, the chief executive of the charity Suffolk Libraries, said libraries had been “warm rooms since the 1860s”. His more serious point is that they were already offering something similar before the cost of living crisis. But the crisis highlighted their vital role as “one of the few public spaces that are safe, free and accessible”.
The Alphabetti Theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne opened a warm space to offer locals a respite from what Ali Pritchard, the theatre’s artistic and executive director, said was an increasingly poor and disconnected society. He said: “It was a no-brainer for us. We realised people needed it and wouldn’t have anywhere else to go.”
About 550,000 people used warm spaces during the winter, according to Warm Welcome. That may be an underestimate; it has another survey that suggests the figure may be as high as 2.5 million. Its network represents only a fraction of the UK’s warm rooms: a Labour party survey in December indicated there were about 13,000.
About two-thirds of the warm rooms planned to stay open for the rest of the year, the survey found.
