John wrote:

However, when the iron is plugged in the socket in living room , with no
other major appliances on, the lights are still flickering occasionally. The
lights are on a different circuit to the sockets and the fusebox doesn't
appear to be warm. This wasn't noticeable before the meltdown. Is it
possible that the wiring has been damaged elsewhere as well?

We had a flickering problem for weeks. It turned out to be a faulty
pole fuse, i.e. on the power pole outside. The power company said that
we should have complained about it before it got so bad.