London consistently tops UK bed bug call-out statistics, and it's not a coincidence. Three factors stack the deck: extremely dense housing, one of the highest tourist and short-let turnovers in Europe, and a huge stock of HMOs and converted flats with shared walls, floors and voids.
Bed bugs don't need to travel far — they walk from flat to flat through skirting gaps, service risers and communal hallways. In converted Victorian and Edwardian terraces (the majority of inner-London housing), those routes are everywhere.
That's why single-flat chemical treatments so often fail in London: the neighbouring flat re-seeds the problem within weeks. A single-visit whole-property heat treatment is the only approach that reliably closes it down.