This thread kicked off my thoughts on Hot War and I've been noodling away with some setting stuff in the meantime. Some of this is actual paragraphs of draft text, others are simply ideas at this stage. Please do feel free to comment/critique/shoot down in flames/etc.

HMS Belfast (the main fire-power of the Navy in London, was due to be scrapped in '63, eventually became a museum ship o the Thames. In this time line, it's still on the Thames, but not as a museum)

Due to be stricken from the register and sent to suffer the final ignominy of the breakers yard, Belfast was saved from her fate by the outbreak of war. On detached duty when the balloon went up, she survived the apocalypse that befell much of the RN. She sailed round the South Coast, finding major RN bases nothing but radiation-spewing craters or monster-infested hell-holes.

Her arrival on the Thames was greeted with delight by the increasingly desperate Admiralty and with cheers by ecstatic Londoners who saw her as a grey-hulled saviour. Belfast now serves as artillery platform and floating naval base, serving as a tender to more numerous small craft such motor gunboats (MGBs) and motor torpedo boats (MTBs). Fuel permitting, she makes a rare sortie down the Thames estuary to shell know infestation concentrations, sometimes venturing as far north as Hull or as far along the South Coast as Dover as part of a continued effort to control incursions coming across the North Sea and English Channel.

HMS Dreadnought (the first RN nuclear submarine, launched 1960, now docked on the Thames and providing power to military facilities. Heavily, almost paranoiacly, guarded)

The Dogs (Isle of Dogs, badly run down, abandoned and riddled with monsters. Also rumoured to be the staging ground for Soviet infiltrators)

Frogtown (area of many French refugees, located south of the river in the Southwark/Brixton area. Receives very little in the way of security)

Isle of Sheppey Internment Camp (huge concentration camp where boat people and other refugees and thrown. Guarded by the army and navy)

Those who have managed to survive the holocaust that has engulfed the European continent. Those who have made the arduous journey across the storm tossed North Sea or the fog-bound English channel. Those who expect a haven in Southern England. They are the disappointed.

What was a flood of refugees has slowed down somewhat since the initial, horrible weeks of the war, but still they come in rowing boats, on rafts, in decrepit steamers and rusting torpedo boats. Rather than receiving a welcome, they are rounded up and hustled at gunpoint into the huge holding pens and camps that occupy what was once idyllic Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary. Under combined Army and Navy command, the ISIC or simply Sheppey Camp, is a seething, dirty, rebellious mass of humanity.

With the Government more concerned with looking after the remnants of the British population, they have little care, time or resources for refugees, no matter how pitiable their state and how horrific their experiences. One of the scarcest commodities in the camp is fresh water, a rarity in London itself and as precious as bullets in Sheppey. A band of Belgian engineers have managed, with limited co-operation from the RN, set up a small de-salination plant that runs on power produced by internees pedalling their guts out on a series of bicycles hooked up to electrical generators. Compared to the needs of the camp, the quantities produced are tiny, but it does serve to supplement the meagre daily supplies brought in by barge.

The Maunsley Forts (divided between the Navy and the army. Former AA towers in the Thames estuary, now used as early warning stations, RADAR emplacements and surface gunnery emplacements)