At a recent “hoarding panel” meeting in east London, Daniel Pearson, commander for Shadwell and Whitechapel fire stations, played attenders a recording of a 999 call in which a panicked resident reported a fire at their home. A team of firefighters was dispatched immediately, but couldn’t access the property. Pearson displayed photographs from the scene, taken after the event: the doorways and corridors were blocked by heaps of possessions, now charred and unrecognisable. The person who made the call died. Pearson told me this kind of case is seen regularly. Last year, the London fire brigade attended 1,036 hoarding-related fires, which led to 186 injuries and 10 deaths. It now logs the properties of identified hoarders on a database, so fire stations know to send out extra firefighters if a fire is reported in one of them.
The hoarding panel, which meets monthly, brings together senior firefighters, mental health workers, landlords of social housing properties, and housing and environmental health council officers. At most meetings, they debate interventions for specific cases: should fire-fighters visit and offer smoke alarms and flame-retardant bedding? Could the person be referred to a specialist support programme? Or should the landlord consider forcible cleaning or eviction? Underlying these questions is a larger one: what can we do about hoarding? The panel’s very existence is a sign of a shift in the understanding of hoarding: not as a simple matter of too much stuff, but as a complex condition that requires targeted social policies and careful, long-term management.
In the mid-00s, sensationalist reality TV shows with names like The Hoarder Next Door, Britain’s Biggest Hoarders or Hoarding: Buried Alive made hoarding a matter of public fascination. These shows presented hoarding as a fairly straightforward problem that afflicts a few peculiar individuals, and that has an easy solution: tidy up. But hoarding disorder is a major public health issue. Several recent studies estimate that hoarding affects somewhere between 2% and 6% of the worldwide population. (This makes hoarding one of the most prevalent mental health conditions; the World Health Organization estimates around 5% of adults globally have depression.) Although the NHS in Britain does not release specific data on hoarding, support workers and council officers told me that it accounts for a significant proportion of “bedblocking”, as hospitals cannot discharge people to unsafe properties. I spoke to social workers who said it’s not unusual for them to be injured by falling possessions when they visit a hoarder’s home; they’ve learned to assess the “avalanche risk” by asking for photos of the property in advance.
Late last year, I sat in on a meeting in another London borough
