The fledgling Confederacy were quick to instigate new laws, controlling the Restless and marshaling the Enfants just as the Hierarchy had done before them, but this time under the guise of former Renegade gang-leader Joan Sutherland, in her court on a tube train deep below ground.
The growing civil and political unrest in the Skinlands, as well as a host of new laws restricting the rights and benefits of the Quick, fed the Confederacy with a host of new recruits. Massive unemployment and terrible health provisions meant that newly-dead Enfants were easy pickings for the tentative expeditions of the Confederacy's Reapers. Pollution, disease and violence were rife, and the hundreds of Enfants that once would have fed opposing Legions of the Hierarchy were now all channeled into Joan's unified Confederacy. The weather grew hotter and more unpredictable, and smog in London became a daily appearance.

When the Thames Barrier finally gave up in 2010, thousands of people were drowned in the tube network, or in houses and offices bordering the river. Confederacy Reapers worked recovering Enfants way into the evening, and when they finally abandoned those above ground to the Storm, they had only managed to save around a third of those pushed across by the disaster. For weeks, the Reapers patrolled the tunnels recovering those left in the Shadowlands by the dozen.

It was here that the strength of Oblivion and its effect on the Shroud proved of great use to the Restless, because, when the waters rushed to fill the tunnels harbouring London's dead, they were not swept away or destroyed by the flash-flood, instead, they stood dumb-struck as the water rushed around them, leaving them intact. Confederacy scholars have suggested that, with the land of the living so far removed from the Shadowlands, its obstructions no longer affected them. Certainly, while unable to see the living, the Restless were not harmed by them. Either way, the situation proved its silver-lining. Not only were the dead below ground not Harrowed or forced up into the storm, but the flooding provided them with a network of tunnels utterly abandoned by the living. Soon, London's Restless began to take advantage of this, and the world of the dead was given a foothold on its climb away from Oblivion.