Warm spaces for winter 2025

Over the past few years the cost-of-living crisis and rising energy costs have meant that many people in the UK have struggled to stay warm during the winter months. To address this, many third sector and public sector organisations started creating directories of offers of warm spaces in libraries, community centres, churches etc. This huge effort resulted in well over 150 different directories of warm spaces.

Many of the directories are bandwidth-hungry pages. Ofcom research from October 2021 estimated that 2 million households were "experiencing affordability issues with either their fixed broadband and/or smartphone" and we might expect there to be a large overlap with people struggling to afford heating. Keeping bandwidth use down should be a key aim for resources aimed at those who are struggling.

In 2022 we created a simple search engine for warm spaces. It indexes the existing directories, keeps data transfer down, respects people's privacy, and links back to all the original sources. Each winter since we've made sure to update our index of directories because organisations move things around on their websites or change how they present their directories.

We've just done a major update of the index for the coming winter. We've updated links/sources, made tweaks, and improved how we spot/process opening hours. As of today we are indexing 9,988 warm spaces from 103 different directories. That number isn't static and will change as organisations add/remove from their directories.

Please share links to our warm space finder tool with anyone you think could benefit from it. If you know of a directory that we aren't indexing, let us know.

We are able to do this sort of public-interest work thanks to our sponsors.