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This is a local authority the size of a large village, sitting inside a financial district

Census 2021 counted 8,583 usual residents in the City of London and 4,914 households. That makes it the smallest local authority in London by a factor of sixteen. It is also the most concentrated: 86.96% of households are in a purpose-built block of flats or tenement, the highest share of the 33 London local authorities, and just 0.14% are detached, 0.31% semi-detached and 1.59% terraced, the lowest share on all three counts. A further 5.54% are in a converted building such as a former school, church or warehouse, and 4.13% are in a commercial building such as an office or over a shop. Those last two are also the highest in London.

Two more figures follow from that and they matter to anyone holding a spanner here. 51.0% of City households contain one person and 35.96% contain two, both the highest shares in London. And 63.76% of homes sit at an occupancy rating of 0 on the bedroom standard, meaning exactly the number of bedrooms the household needs, again the highest in London. Only 4.21% are at -1 and 0.53% at -2 or less, both near the bottom of the London table.

Read plainly, that is a borough of small, precisely sized, professionally managed flats occupied by one or two adults. There is almost no family housing, almost no house that anyone owns freehold and almost no loft conversion with a shower squeezed into it. The domestic emergency plumbing market here is genuinely small, and the honest thing to say is that most of what fails in the Square Mile fails in a building somebody else manages.

The heating map is unlike anywhere else in England

Across England 73.96% of households heat on mains gas alone. In the City of London it is 26.92%, the lowest of any London local authority. In its place: 39.41% of homes heat on electricity only, the highest share in London against a London figure of 12.62%, and 18.62% are on a district or communal heat network only, again the highest in London against 3.41% for London and 0.92% for England. Another 3.74% recorded no central heating at all, second highest in London, and 2.95% recorded other central heating only, first in London.

That single table decides what an out-of-hours call in EC1, EC2, EC3 or EC4 usually turns out to be. It is far more often an immersion element, an unvented cylinder, a thermostat, a discharging temperature and pressure relief valve, or a heat interface unit that has stopped talking to the landlord's plant, than it is a wall-hung gas combi. Where there is gas it is a minority system in an otherwise electric building, which is exactly the arrangement most likely to have an awkward flue route or a ventilation problem, and our engineers are Gas Safe registered for that reason.

The heat network share changes the shape of the job again. On a network, the fault you experience in your flat is very often not in your flat. There is nothing to isolate, nothing to replace and no part to fit. What an engineer can usefully do at two in the morning is establish which side of the heat interface unit the failure sits on, get you hot water another way if that is possible, and put a dated written finding in your hand that the estate office or the operator has to answer. That is a different service from a repair and we price and describe it as one.

Nearly half the residents live on two estates, and both of them are listed

The City's residential population is not spread evenly across the Square Mile. It is concentrated in a handful of estates, chiefly the Barbican and Golden Lane in the north west and the Portsoken estates in the east. The Corporation's own conservation area document records that Golden Lane Estate was completed with 1,400 flats and maisonettes plus a community centre, nursery, playground, swimming pool, badminton court, gardens, shops and a pub, and that the Barbican Estate, built between 1962 and 1982 to designs by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, is prevailingly residential with over 2,000 flats, maisonettes and terraced houses arranged on a raised pedestrian podium above ground-level car parking.

Both are protected to an unusual degree. The Corporation records that in 1997 buildings on the Golden Lane Estate were individually listed, and that in 2001 the entire Barbican was designated a single listed building, all at grade II except for Crescent House at grade II*. The Barbican is also a grade II* Registered Park and Garden, and Golden Lane received the same designation at grade II in 2020. The Barbican and Golden Lane Conservation Area and its present boundary were designated in October 2018.

The Corporation's own assessment is that the Barbican, with its blocks conjoined by the podium, is arguably a single building, and that this sets it apart from other conservation areas in the City, which are aggregates of many individual buildings. Practically, that means a change of pipe route, a flue, a soil stack, an external condensate run or a visible fitting is not a free choice on these estates in the way it would be in a 1970s block elsewhere. Emergency work to stop water never waits for consent, and we use reversible methods so that it does not have to. The permanent reinstatement is where the consent question belongs, raised before you commit rather than after.

The scale of the change here is worth stating, because it explains the building stock. The Corporation records that in the mid-19th century over 130,000 people were residents within the City of London, and that by 1952 the number living within the square mile had dropped to just 5,000. Cripplegate ward, largely garment warehouses, was left after wartime bombing with deep basements, vast piles of rubble and 48 residents. Almost every home in the City today is a deliberate post-war or later act of repopulation, which is why the domestic stock is so uniform and so young compared with any neighbouring borough.

Most of the water and drainage here belongs to a building, not to a household

48.29% of City households rent privately, the highest share of any London local authority, and 42.0% rent from a private landlord or letting agency, again the highest. Only 13.84% own with a mortgage or loan, and shared ownership is the lowest in London at 0.24%. So the person standing next to the leak is very frequently a tenant, an office manager or a night porter, and very rarely the person who owns the pipe or can authorise spend on it.

That, plus a resident population of 8,583 inside a district with an enormous daytime working population, is why the plumbing demand in the Square Mile is dominated by commercial and managed premises: office washrooms and tea points, commercial kitchens and their grease-related drainage, plant rooms, sprinkler and wet riser infrastructure, and blocks where a facilities team rather than a homeowner holds the keys. We are set up for that. We isolate first, stabilise the building, and then agree the repair and the price with whoever is actually responsible, whether that is a managing agent, a facilities manager, a landlord or a tenant.

Water supply is the one thing we will not put a number on. The Drinking Water Inspectorate lists the City of London in Thames Water Utilities Ltd's area of supply, and Thames Water publishes a hardness scale of soft up to 100 mg/l calcium carbonate, slightly hard 100 to 150, moderately hard 150 to 200, hard 200 to 300 and very hard more than 300. Thames Water states that all the water in its region is hard. Its per-postcode zone lookup sits behind a bot-detection challenge that we will not work around, so we give no zone-specific figure for an EC postcode and we tell you to check your own on the company's site rather than quoting a neighbour's.