When Fatma Mustafa began attending Walworth Living Room, a community project in south London, a few years ago, she began to feel like it was her second home. The registered “warm space” is designed to feel like a living room: comfy sofas, a communal table, activities and food in a warm environment.

Mustafa, 48, says that on universal credit (UC) it is hard to cover bills and easy to fall into debt. Attending three days a week, she says, cuts costs on energy and groceries.

She has a pay-as-you-go energy meter, which is increasingly “just eating my money away”, she says. And “you can have food here, and then at least you’re full up for the day”.

But more than cost of living help, Mustafa says, the people she has met here have become “like my family” and helped her through painful times. “They’ve been there for me,” she says. “I just love it.”

Walworth Living Room is a registered “warm space” with the local authority, one of 50 this winter in the London borough of Southwark. The average annual bill for typical gas and electricity consumption under the energy price cap is now £1,755, 44% higher than winter 2021-22.

Over that time, a trend has emerged that has gone largely unnoticed: since 2022 community “warm banks” or “warm spaces” have sprung up right across the UK. The Warm Welcome Campaign, an initiative from the Good Faith Foundation charity, says it has risen from just over 4,000 registered warm hubs in winter 2022-23 to almost 6,000 in 2025-26.

But similar to the rise of food banks 10 years ago, there is discomfort among volunteers and anti-poverty charities about warm spaces becoming another entrenched part of the UK landscape that should be the government’s responsibility. Some call warm spaces a new austerity innovation that joins other kinds of charity “banks” – food banks, warm banks, baby banks, multibanks.

“Much like food banks, warm spaces emerged as temporary responses to the energy crisis and have become normalised in local communities by stealth,” says Sabine Goodwin, the director of the Independent Food Aid Network, a national network of food banks.

These types of charities have a positive impact but are “sticking-plaster, stopgap measures,” she says, rather than strategic interventions that tackle poverty’s root causes.

Walworth Living Room is one warm space trying to operate differently. When the Guardian visited on Thursday, people were sharing homemade food, knitting together, taking an English class, chatting and drinking tea – some there for cost of living reasons, some not.

“We’re not branding it as a ‘warm bank’, in the same way we wouldn’t brand it as a ‘food bank’, because our aim long term is to build the type of neighbourhood in which food banks and warm banks are not needed,” says Mike Wilson, the executive director of Pembroke House, the charity that runs Walworth Living Room.

“The fact that we live in a society in which people can’t afford to put food on their table or heat their homes is a scandal. There have got to be systemic solutions,” Wilson says.

“So there’s a tension: how do you meet the immediate need, whilst building the power to come up with the solutions?”

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation published its cost of living tracker for winter 2025-26 this week, which looks at UK households with incomes in the bottom 40%. It found 58% of these households had cut down on heating to reduce bills, and 51% cut spending on food due to affordability.

Walworth Living Room has been there for Nazma Khanom, 52, during a traumatic period. She says that after being diagnosed with cancer in 2023, for which she has undergone a range of surgeries and treatments, finances have been tight.

She says keeping up mortgage payments on personal independence payment (Pip) has been a struggle, and she turns on the heating for an hour a day.

Before her diagnosis, working at a nearby school, Khanom says that each Christmas she would prepare rice and chicken for everyone: families, children, elderly people and homeless people. But after losing her job, Khanom says she needed to use a food bank in 2023 and 2024.

“It was so bad,” she says. “Now I feel like I’m the person who needs support, whereas before I was giving the support … bills just keep going higher and higher.”

She adds: “I always look forward to a Thursday to come here and get out the house … because of the people here. I’ve started a new hobby – they gave me a needle and wool, and it took my mind off my illness.” They also made a space where Khanom can pray, and she feels appreciated and welcomed.

Not everyone at Walworth Living Room needs support with the cost of living. Margaret Regan, 81, says she attends for companionship. “I’m on my own now,” she says.

“I have got family around, but the danger is, you become very insular and everything closes down. So when I come here, I’ve met all these people – and of all different ages.” The charity’s wider aim is to help knit the neighbourhood together in this way.

Regan says she gets a good pension, so help with the cost of living is not her primary motivation, but that there’s no stigma whatever people’s needs. “I’m damn sure there are people that come here, and that is probably all they’re gonna eat for the rest of the day – but they’re not made to feel as if they’re imposing.”

On Thursday, Regan was wearing Christmas-themed earrings. Usually she comes to crochet, but on her last visit before the holidays, “I thought, I’m just gonna have a chat today!”

David Barclay, the campaign director of the Warm Welcome Campaign, says warm spaces cannot solve poverty’s systemic causes.

“Nobody wants to live in a country where people are forced to go to community spaces during the winter because otherwise they would be cold in their homes,” Barclay says. Instead, his vision is of “people choosing to go to community spaces” to find “belonging, purpose and connection”.

“There was a really lovely quote from someone running a warm space I heard recently,” Barclay says. “‘There’s more to warming someone up than just heating.’”

Wilson hopes community spaces like it can help inform the national approach to tackling poverty – and advocate for effective policy interventions.

“You can’t solve the cost of living crisis at a neighbourhood scale,” he says, “but there are huge amounts of neighbourhood innovation that could be relevant to the answers.”

In the meantime, this winter, “warm spaces” will continue plugging a much-needed gap. “It feels like the government isn’t really helping people,” Mustafa says.

“On UC they expect you to pay all your bills but you can end up with bailiffs at your door. It’s hard.”