London is now Britain's wildfire capital – and insurers are only just catching on

Ask most people to picture a wildfire and they'll think of California canyons or the pine forests of Provence, not the North Circular. New figures suggest that's a mistake worth correcting fast.

Analysis released this week by data and analytics firm LexisNexis Risk Solutions found that London recorded 39 wildfire detections within 5km of the city's boundary in 2025 – more than any other urban area in the UK. It's an odd list to put together, mixing a global capital with commuter towns and seaside resorts, but that's rather the point: fire risk is turning up in places the market has never really had to underwrite for.

^{Source: LexisNexis Risk Solutions, satellite-derived wildfire detection analysis, 2025}

The urban tally sits inside a much bigger number. LexisNexis, which built its picture from satellite data captured by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (excluding industrial fires and low-confidence readings), counted 4,659 wildfire detections across the UK in 2025. That's the highest annual figure across the decade of data LexisNexis analysed, comfortably ahead of the previous high of 3,305 in 2018, and almost five times the 951 logged in 2024.

Spring, not summer, lit the fuse

The seasonal breakdown challenges a fairly deep-rooted assumption in the market. Insurers have tended to treat wildfire as a high-summer peril, but LexisNexis found spring produced more detections than summer last year – 2,635 against 1,606. The explanation isn't as alarming as the raw numbers suggest: early-season fires are often tied to controlled land management burning on rural moorland and heath, carried out while vegetation left over from winter is still dry.

Where it gets more relevant for underwriters is what happens as the year moves on. Caroline Elliott-Grey, senior product manager for UK and Ireland insurance at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, said summer fires behave differently to their spring counterparts, occurring roughly twice as close to towns and cities. That shift in location, rather than in raw fire count, is what pushes exposure onto residential and commercial property books – and with it, the risk of costlier claims.

Elliott-Grey said wildfire exposure to homes and commercial property is becoming "almost as important" to understand as flood or subsidence risk, and argued it now needs assessing property-by-property, at the point of quote, rather than treated as background noise.

A summer built for this

The data lands at an awkward moment. England had its warmest June on record this year, according to Met Office statistics stretching back to 1884, with the UK and Wales close behind on second warmest. A run of heatwaves has followed, and fire services have spent much of the summer describing conditions as close to the edge of what they can manage.

Government has already moved on the response side. In June, ministers announced a £97 million investment in National Resilience fire assets – the largest overhaul of specialist kit in nearly two decades – along with dedicated wildfire response teams stationed in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Northumberland, London and South Wales. It's a sensible move on the emergency-response side, but it doesn't change the underwriting problem: the exposure has already built up in portfolios that were never priced with it in mind.

That gap has been widening for a while. Insurance Business reported last month that the UK was underprepared for wildfire risk as 2025 losses hit record levels, with domestic subsidence payouts alone reaching £307 million. Wildfire itself has typically been filed under the same "hot, dry summer" umbrella as subsidence rather than treated as a standalone peril – something reinforced by warnings around this year's third heatwave and, more recently, by a Suffolk wildfire that added to a wider run of fires across northern Europe this summer.

What it means at the underwriting desk

None of this suggests wildfire is about to rival flood or subsidence as a driver of UK claims volume – it isn't, not yet. But the LexisNexis findings point to something brokers and underwriters can act on now rather than later: location-specific risk data. Elliott-Grey argues that combining historical fire detection data with geospatial detail on weather patterns, terrain and proximity to infrastructure such as fire stations gives insurers a much sharper view of where risk is actually concentrated, both at individual property level and across a wider book.

For a market that's spent the last few summers firefighting (in every sense) subsidence claims from cracked clay soils, that's a useful nudge. Wildfire has quietly stopped being a peril that only shows up in reinsurance cat models for Mediterranean exposure. It's showing up within five kilometres of London.