For those not local, the Horniman Museum is a family favourite for South Londoners and those from further afield. Famed for its overstuffed walrus (which has become the emblem of Forest Hill), amazing views over London and varied buildings set in beautiful grounds, it has been the location of many fun outings for our family.

So in preparation for the interview, and as an end of school term treat, Louise and daughter went for an outing and an investigation into the museum’s work on air quality. Not far from a recent outing to an art exhibition about Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s life, our daughter is now used to the combination of sweet treats and hunting for air pollution stories!

We were aware that there were some issues with the air quality monitor that had been installed so of course we took the opportunity to track pollution levels on AirTrack. Below is our walk from the bottom of the grounds up to the centre/high point, showing some fairly high pollution levels, but the AirTrack score being buoyed by the route choice away from main roads.

Anyway, enough of the preamble! Louise’s interview with Henry was really interesting and covered many aspects of air quality from public engagement to monitoring, and reducing emissions to the link with biodiversity. Some key insights:

• their work stemmed from the death of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, who died in 2013 and was the first and only person to have air pollution listed on her death certificate; like Ella’s route to school, the Horniman is also located on the South Circular road, with pollution levels showing as elevated or even very elevated at times

• a focus on air pollution is key to everything they do on sustainability, but sometimes funding can be restrictive and not extend to improving air quality - which Henry saw as a missed opportunity to hit multiple objectives at once

• they’ve used the Air Pollution Footprint tool to identify, quantify and prioritise work on air quality, which gives a rounded picture including building and vehicle emissions on site as well as travel to and from the location

• their main achievement to date has been the planting of Miyawaki method barrier, which is a fast growing and dense border, separating the grounds from the main road, with the aim of reducing particulate matter pollution - see Louise pictured in front of it in the picture above; the efficacy has yet to be proven and there is the challenge of including evergreen plants which might continue any air quality gains into winter

And…

• the new cafe and playground at the bottom of the grounds had various sustainability elements as part of the plan, but what was notable was the consideration of location being as far away as possible from main roads - this stands out as great holistic thinking about how the environment impacts on the people using the site (not just the typical energy and materials considerations)

• future aims include decarbonising the Butterfly House (for both carbon reduction and air pollution objectives) and ideally bringing back the living roof for the library building, though the latter would require considerable funding

• their air quality monitoring story has been challenging and reminded Louise a bit of our own story from hand-held monitors outside the school gates to fixed location Breathe London monitors: unfortunately their council-provided monitor located near the main entrance only delivered data for a few months before going offline (see below) and their aim to have monitors on either side of the green barrier is still a work in progress; while single time readings of nitrous oxides on either side of the barrier can only tell as small part of the story

• in conclusion, Henry thought they could go much further in their air quality work, but Louise was impressed by the range of projects and potential for a museum such as the Horniman to be a real thought leader and awareness raiser.

As mentioned, the opening to investigate what the Horniman have been doing came initially from Louise’s invitation to a roundtable on air quality hosted at City Hall by Deputy Mayors, Mete Coban and Debbie Weekes-Bernard. What was special about this roundtable was the attendance from far beyond the air quality community, including Sport London as well as the Horniman museum. We’ll only achieve our aims by engaging health professionals, sportspeople, artists and many more!

Readers will recall our work with London Marathon in April. Well, this ended up on the front cover and centre spread of Air Quality News last month. Why is it so important for the air quality industry? This was the first time such a major event had provided live air quality data to its runners and spectators. And runners and running events are pretty influential, so the hope is that the awareness raised here will trickle down to other walks of life. If you want to delve in more, we have a dedicated Marathon page.

One thing led to another, as they say, and two pretty momentous things happened over last weekend (and we’re not talking Sacha’s birthday or Louise’s flamenco show!)

Firstly, we were introduced to the Diamond League - the premier annual series in international athletics, comprising 14 one-day meetings held across cities including Shanghai, Rabat, Oslo, London, and Zurich. Athletes earn points throughout the season to qualify for the Diamond League Final, where champions are crowned in each discipline. We were invited to provide air quality data for the event in London - important for the health and performance of the athletes, as well as spectators.

As well as providing air quality data and insights for the big screen, we had a stand where we created the first ever “air pong” - a variation on beer pong with balls displaying all our favourite (!) pollutants (PM2.5, PM10, NO2, SO2, O3). It was a great engagement tool, particularly for children. Many were already aware about air pollution from learning at school, which was reassuring!

A timely link

As for the second piece - Paula Radcliffe (who, as we reminded ourselves, held the women’s marathon world record for 16 years!), seemed to be aware of our work and data when speaking to a Times journalist about air pollution. So he tracked us down and Louise spoke to him for his article about running in heat and pollution, which came out last Friday. Sorry all The Times links are behind paywalls but you’ll forgive our excitement!

And in turn, this led to Louise being interviewed live on Times Radio early on Saturday. The focus was on the impact of ozone, which can build up during sunny days and impact respiratory health of runners. So the lives of air pollution enthusiasts - one up ready on webcam and the other ready to race out of the door to get to the Olympic Park for the Diamond League. Two fantastic opportunities!

Where does this take us?

Well, sorry for the cheesy ending, but “from A to B”! Alongside all this we’ve also been busy building and launching our Plan a Route feature! This enables anyone to put in a destination on AirTrack and get recommendations for the cleanest route. Check it out - we’d love feedback!

*We did have a bit of fun with the World Cup, creating this interactive Clean Air Cup - we’d love to know what you think of the data and whether it influenced the results! We’ve written up our thoughts here.

We are still waiting for the Clean Air (Human Rights) Act to progress further through Parliament alongside various other parliamentary and government processes. The topic was up for a Westminster Hall debate a couple of weeks ago. But as UK-based readers will know, politics is hardly predictable at present…

So it’s great to see that the Confederation of British Industry (CBI, commissioned by Clean Air Fund) has released a report about the economic impact of air pollution in the UK - and the gains that could be achieved if the UK meets the ‘balanced pathway’ in the world of net zero climate change planning. This is important, not just to make the link to climate change goals, but to draw out economic impact - money talks after all! We haven’t written much about this - we covered economic incentives a bit last year. Perhaps this is a reflection of how under-studied the topic is.

Disproportionate gains

Anyway, the key stats from the CBI report are another set of fairly bewildering numbers if the balanced pathway is met - by 2050, 264,000 deaths avoided, 2.8 million life years gained, 497,000 hospital admissions prevented, £7.7bn productivity gains. It also has the interesting finding of a disproportionate benefit to Londoners (17% of benefit compared to 13% of population). We checked in with the author about how the balanced pathway links to the usual goalpost of achieving World Health Organisation guidelines, and over what period - not directly comparable but both would involve a similar set of changes to our economy.

Many voices, including Asthma + Lung UK and the Ella Roberta Foundation continue the quest to achieve World Health Organisation guidelines and to undertake a public health campaign around air quality. Not everything runs smoothly though, with the Dieselgate trial not achieving all the goals that Mums for Lungs had set out to achieve. Mums for Lungs do incredible work, from idling campaigns and school streets support to raising awareness about wood burning and we wish them the best and they consider next steps.

Sometimes it can feel hard to know how to act, but there are always opportunities to contribute. If you are 65 or over, you can take part in this research study into how people manage temperature and air pollution in homes. It’s being run by University of Leeds and overseen by friend of this blog, Dr Douglas Booker. And one reader has told us they are already fully up and running with the study!

ImpactFULL

The impact of air pollution on women is multi-faceted but for the purposes of these two opportunities, we have decided to focus on the impact during pregnancy. As the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists points out, pregnancy impacts range from gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia, to miscarriage and still birth; and on the baby of pre-term birth and low birth weight.

A major recent study from King’s College London found developmental delays for children who were exposed to air pollution before birth. Inequalities in society also come to the fore, with black mothers and babies facing more severe risks - as speakers at the Black Child Clean Air conference (below) reinforced.

And yet, expectant mothers are rarely given guidance about how to reduce exposure to pollution. Over the next 6-9 months, along with UCL researchers and with support of the Nexus collective, we aim to speak to pregnant and recently pregnant women to understand how they engage, or could engage, with air pollution information and recommendations. From that, we hope to design a pregnancy-focused version of AirTrack.

We need to clear ethics requirements at UCL before we can formally launch but do get in touch if you would like to be kept informed about progress and potentially get involved as the work really gets underway in the Autumn!

Until the study gets underway, we don’t have much in the way of pregnancy-specific data. But now that we’ve found the Breathe London monitoring node at King’s Hospital, where many of our local friends have given birth, we thought this could offer a good reminder of where our most vulnerable are being cared for - and sadly some of the first breaths of the babies born there.

We can’t wait to get stuck into the work on this crucial and under-explored topic!

Here are our daughter’s Clean Air Day pledges such as not using a car (“that I don’t have”) and a superhero called Airy who will suck up fumes and pick up rubbish. It’s great the school are doing this (we think it’s partly to progress with this Transport for London accreditation). But we did spot other pledges focused on carbon footprint, which of course relates to air quality, but in itself isn’t pollution. We ask: better that they engage children with the subject or should the pedagogic input be a bit more precise?

Louise met the Chief Scientist of Department of Energy Security and Net Zero last week, who told her about some videos she had created during lockdown about air pollution, aimed at schools and children. All still very relevant! We’ll have the chance to discuss all this with Ciara Alleyne, new local councillor for the school, and Deputy Leader of Lambeth covering environmental issues, in a couple of weeks’ time.

Always Awair

We take the opportunity for air pollution awareness wherever we go! (Poor daughter!) Recently we found ourselves in Peckham Rye Station where one of the Awair monitors is. This project is initiated by friend of this blog, Andy Grieve. We’ve been remarking recently how we’ve used local pollution data from next to the school and yet we have no idea where the actual physical monitor is! So this is a great way of bringing the data to life, and in a very congested area of London.

And now for the fun part! We’ve been building a Tamagotchi with our daughter which shows a happy through to sick dog, depending on the local air pollution levels. We have the possibility to get a small grant from Breathe London and we wondered: should we use it to create a second one which can be loaned out to families, say for a month at a time. Families could use it on the school run, or even contribute to programming it. Please comment or message us if you think this would be popular!

We presented all this at an event for London Climate Action Week. It was a new experience for us combining ‘pure’ data (basically numbers) with experiential data, such as how an urban environment feels and what good and bad aspects it presents to Cityzens.

We were able to bring together the ongoing data streams for the two Breathe London monitors (bottom right, with Brixton in orange and Camberwell in green) with our AirTrack data showing dosage of runners (orange) and walkers (green) during the event. One key finding was how high ozone was, especially later in the afternoon during the event.

The discussion during the event was in depth, combining experience in London, Accra and Bogotá. We’ve had a long week so forgive us for not having a full summary! If you are on Linked In, here is a summary from the moderator, Gabriel, and from Claudia, one of the panellists. Perhaps we can delve into those international city stories in future blogs!

And the winner is…

Our excuse for almost running out of steam this week, is that it’s been full on trying to get votes for the Reset Connect prize for Air Aware Labs. And guess what - we did it! We started yesterday about 100 votes behind the leader, and by 3pm we were almost 200 above. Incredible, but also stressful! Huge thanks to everyone who voted for us - we know it wasn’t the most straightforward process!

Later on yesterday, Louise went out to Parliament to find out if we’d won the Entrepreneur of the Year and Investee Company of the Year awards. We didn’t but were so happy just to be recognised as finalists in this prestigious ceremony!

So please come and support us at this run+walk with UrbanBetter this Sunday at 2pm. We will start at the Brixton monitoring node and move towards the monitor at King’s Hospital in Camberwell, taking in air quality and experiential data. Our learnings will then be presented at two events during London Climate Action Week - sign up for Tuesday 23rd (our slot at 4pm) or Wednesday 24th (our slot around 4.30pm)!

Storytelling

We were delighted to be named runners up in the Breathe London inaugural awards for Storytelling, for this very blog! We were pipped to the top spot by our friends at What’s the Matter CIC. Also very happy that Knitting the Air got the top spot in the Community awards.

The event was at Vodafone’s offices and we heard from Deputy Mayor, Mete Coban, and others about the importance of clean air for health - what it’s all about, after all! We understand some new announcements about the latest data for London will be coming next week, so keep your eyes peeled. This video, featuring many friends of this blog, tells London’s story to date.

Louise was also impressed while, en route to the event, she was in a tube carriage with secondary school pupils and their teachers going on an outing to measure air pollution levels and discussing what they can do about it. A key question was - do we trade off the benefits of living in the city with the downsides of pollution, ie is Urban Better? We’d rather ask, can Urban be Better through reducing exposure to pollution?

Not at the level we’d want

Our friends at Imperial have been creating videos to showcase each local project, and here is the one for Brixton. As our readers will well know, but the video shows clearly, levels of pollution at the Brixton node are well above what they should be, so it’s all hands to the pump still.

If all this talk of communications has piqued your interest and you want to try your hand at pictures that exemplify air pollution and its impacts, this contest is open until 26 June!

We need you!

We know we can count on our readers to help us get back to the top of the leaderboard in this competition. And it really, really matters… we could win £10k next week for Air Aware Labs to continue developing our low pollution routing and other tools to help people reduce their exposure to pollution. It’s a bit of a complicated process, but we would be so so grateful! Just make sure you hit the orange vote button and not the triangle upvote!

Readers will know we like to be locally grounded while also looking globally for inspiration. So while some of our local initiatives are a bit stuck, we thought we would take a look at some of the inspiring work being done further afield - in particular in Africa.

We face forward***

Let’s start with monitoring. For a continent of 1.6 billion people, sensors probably number in the hundreds or low thousands - putting it at the same order of magnitude as the amount of monitoring around London, a city of 9 million people.

So, over at Air Aware Labs, while we like to talk about our product as being global, in reality the coverage in Africa is pretty patchy - parts of East Africa, plus South Africa, but many gaps. So a month ago, we gathered experts from across the continent to discuss how we can proceed.

We met with colleagues from Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda in the East, to Cameroon and Ghana in the West. We heard that data is not only sparse, but also fragmented, and with complexities over the principles of open data versus ownership of the data. But the potential to use the data for public health messaging, infrastructure improvements and cleaner school environments was vast.

We also learnt more about some fantastic initiatives:

• UrbanBetter runs an Africa-led global movement of youth-centred citizen science and civic action supported by digital and social infrastructure

• Airqo provides accurate, hyperlocal, and timely air quality data with over 300 monitors installed, closing the data gap mentioned above

• International Student Environmental Coalition is a youth-led global network of over 30 countries that provides young people the resources, community, and organisational power to engage in grassroots movements for climate justice

• Clean Air (Africa) is a partnership of experts from academic, research, and clinical institutions from the UK, Cameroon, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda.

And separately we met with:

• Breathe Accra, part of the Breathe Cities initiative of which London is a part, which aims to provide open access to hyperlocal air quality data and build capacity for monitoring and managing air quality and tracking air pollution-related diseases

• and Quali-breeze who are building a new initiative in Ghana to generate real-time exposure data and thereby contribute to improved environmental and public health outcomes.

Between these, there is the potential to create a huge continental movement.

Missed-anthropy?

It’s important to mention that many of these initiatives are supported by friends at OpenAQ, University of Chicago Energy Policy Institute, Clean Air Fund and Health Effects Institute. Yet philanthropic funding for air pollution work remains vanishingly small compared to philanthropy as a whole, and relative to the return on investment that could be made. What funding exists is overly focused on richer parts of the world, such as North America.

So what can we do, especially sitting so far from the continent? Louise’s time working at the African Union has made her not only passionate to support where possible, but also very aware that solutions can’t be imposed from the outside. And those outside the continent may well ask, why are we attempting this when the commercial case might be less obvious? (An attempt at an answer here.) However, the vision for our work at Air Aware Labs is to bring hyper-local data at global scale… so we will continue finding ways forward!

Labs-ulous

We’ve had some nice bits of recognition recently for our work at Air Aware Labs. We’ve been shortlisted for Entrepreneur of the Year and for Best Investee Company - we will find out at Parliament on 24 June! That one is in the lap of the judges, but if you’d like to contribute to us having a good week regardless… please vote and help us win £10k at Reset Connect that very same day! To get the full back-story of our work, this recent podcast on CEO Uncensored gets inside what we’re doing over at the Labs!

Readers paying close attention will have noticed that we’ve mentioned UrbanBetter twice in two weeks. We will bring the latest on our event with them during London Climate Action Week (probably Sunday 21 June) as soon as possible - email us on hello@airawarelabs.com if you want to hear first!

Meanwhile, here is a fantastic event for young people on Clean Air Day next Thursday - please spread the word! And you can hear Louise speak at this event at University of East London on 22 June.

*Air pollution in Swahili - possibly a more useful phrase than you might think!

**Quote attributed to Mariam Makeba

***Part of a quote from Kwame Nkrumah: “We face neither East nor West: we face forward”

On the plus side, we are excited to be cooking up something with the amazing UrbanBetter and their Cityzens movement. We can’t say too much yet but will keep you posted - it will involve an event in London. If you want to be the first to know, let us know on hello@airawarelabs.com

One plant too many

On the more challenging side, our work with our local school is never straightforward. As we mentioned six weeks ago, we were starting to plan for how to make the most of the School Street, which will be in place by September (we assume the local elections won’t change that). We had plans for planters, bike parking and maybe a seating area for the children, so they could enjoy the space outside the school more and take time on their school run. But our ideas have been hit with tough local opposition, so we are rethinking.

We’re not claiming that this kind of infrastructure would have a significant, direct effect on air pollution; it’s more about a school environment that encourages active travel, with all the benefits that brings. We saw some incredible statistics from a recent study on air purifiers in primary schools, with huge reductions of absenteeism. So even if cheaper interventions such as greener environments have smaller effects, they could still be well worth doing. Louise was interviewed for the Times Educational Supplement about all this recently - we’ll post when it comes out!

The What’s the Matter festival, starting over the coming days and building up to Clean Air Day involves lots of focus on schools and children’s health so get involved if you can!

First breath

Meanwhile after our highlighting of one MSc student’s research on behaviour change, here is another, this time focused on parents of children with breathing difficulties. Can you help Grace by offering to take part?

What is less clear is what’s next. Parliamentary Committees make recommendations to Government, which is then required to respond and state which actions it will take forward, within two months. So stay tuned.

The sky is red

We were also delighted to see Lord Peter Babudu, previously Executive Director of Impact on Urban Health, call for the Clean Air Bill to be brought forward in Parliament (see his statement from 19:48 on this Parliamentlive.tv link). As readers of this blog will know, this law - sometimes referred to as Ella’s law - has been proposed many times in recent years but has struggled to progress through Parliament. We last saw movement on it last November and six months on we are still waiting for more progress, despite efforts by campaigners to have it included in the King’s speech.

Meanwhile, we are waiting for the response to the government’s woodburning consultation - with the British Medical Journal and Professor Sir Stephen Holgate raising the pressure amidst concerns about industry lobbying. However, Louise was impressed by updates from DEFRA about a wide range of actions they are taking forward as a result of the Environmental Improvement Plan during a recent event (held under Chatham House rule so no specifics here!)

As if we need reminding about why all this matters, there have been a number of warnings about moderate (which in the UK context is pretty high) air pollution over the past week. We’ve seen levels creep up over the past week at our Brixton monitoring node, reflected in wider alerts.

We need to see a concerted effort to get these levels down consistently and across all areas of the country! This particular mountain will need to be climbed by politicians, parliamentarians, local councillors, civil servants and more.

It’s competition time!

Let’s finish this week on an up… there is still time to enter this art competition!

Mums for Lungs are asking primary school children in Lambeth and Southwark to design a bright, bold poster on the theme of clean air - using any art materials - and send them in by 5 June. Five winners will be chosen and announced on Clean Air Day - Thursday 18 June - and will win a micro scooter and have their artwork displayed on a lamp post banner in South London for a year. Get creative!

* As it happens, the Environmental Audit Committee is the only formal Parliamentary outing that Louise had during her time as a civil servant, sitting alongside Rt Hon Justine Greening as Secretary of State for International Development in an inquiry about the Sustainable Development Goals in 2014.

Unfortunately, for our tidy editorial brains, there is a bit of everything since we last reported about six weeks ago! The only clear theme is that air pollution exposure is bad for you (sorry to say…)

Here are some key recent studies and articles:

• link to kidney disease, driving hospitalisation even from short bursts of high pollution exposure

• potential contribution to depression and other aspects of mental health in an article drawing together studies on risks across the population as well as lab-based studies to understand the mechanisms

• impact on menstrual cycle, in a study across 230 cities looking at smoke exposure

• exposure in the womb linked to slower language and motor development, in a ground-breaking study from King’s College London

• updated research on diabetes, noting that confounding factors are hard to account for an more research is needed

• an overview of the health impact in Africa, where air pollution led to 1.1 million deaths on the continent in 2019

• and for a more human-centred story, how moving out of a polluted city lessened asthma symptoms.

Sometimes though, air pollution gets into the news for completely different reasons: many might have spotted the story about President Macron getting somewhat impatient about being interrupted during a visit to Africa. But watch the video to find out what they were interrupting him about!

International House

As reported last week, while establishing our new monitoring node, we spotted that there is a new node on the other side of central Brixton (ironically near to where we originally wanted to site ours but got stuck in planning permission). So now that our new monitor has been up for 10 days we thought we would take a look at both of them - International House is the green comparison line here. (The slightly downwards orange line just after 10 May is where our node was briefly offline during the changeover).

What have we spotted?

• the peaks in particulate matter (which led to the concern about node malfunctioning) seem to exist at International House too - so it does seem something is happening across the locality and it’s not a measurement error

• nitrogen dioxide varies quite a lot between the two - this is not surprising given the impact of traffic and that they are at quite different road locations

• we are still seeing some huge spikes at both locations and for both pollutants, despite the more favourable weather recently.

Survey time!

For AirTrackers out there, please consider taking part in this survey. As part of a MSc research project, we are collaborating with University College London to understand individuals’ relationship with air quality information.

The research project will involve taking part in a short survey, asking about your experiences with using AirTrack. The study seeks to understand the barriers and facilitators to individuals engaging with air quality information, how apps like AirTrack can facilitate greater knowledge and positive behaviour change with air quality information.

Participation in the study includes the opportunity to win up to £50. Link to survey!

And finally…

We know that plastic pollution and air pollution are deeply connected. Microplastics are now being found in our lungs, blood and even placentas, entering our bodies through the food we eat, the air we breathe and the products we use every day.

So we wanted to highlight this event from friends of this blog, Earth Set, in partnership with Blue Earth. Plastics Without Borders: Inside Us | Tuesday 2 June | 7–9.30pm | Mother, Shoreditch. Sign up here!

A couple of months ago we noticed some unexpectedly high readings from our node (which, interestingly, can sometimes be caused by spiders nesting in the sensor). So after speaking to the Breathe London team, we were sent a new sensor. A bit of time passed as we got all the right paperwork together to lean a ladder against a lamppost (approximately four months), but last weekend we did just that: Louise’s feet played a key part in securing the ladder and Sacha ventured upwards to replace the node.

And… that was it. You can see the new data from our node at our air-aware.org site. There’s a tiny gap in the data while the node was changed over. Just before the changeover, there was another of the spikes in particulate matter that we’ve been spotting. The idea now is to see if they keep occurring with the new monitor.

We’ve also noticed there is a new Breathe London node opposite International House (ironically, quite close to where we’d originally planned to install our node back in 2023 but suffered from the vagueries of planning permission combined with sensible street furniture to mount it on). That one also shows spikes in particulate matter at similar times to our decommissioned monitor, so our suspicion is that these are real peaks.

Chuck out the environment

This week was the state opening of Parliament by Charles III. He has a long history of environmental opinions which made us even more disappointed that his speech contained very little policies to address environmental concerns*. There was a welcome statement about decoupling the price of electricity from that of gas (gas power stations fill in capacity gaps from renewable electricity sources, hence a link between the two prices), which would help with the uptake of fossil-free heating such as heat pumps.

There were a great number of things missing: a commitment to a comprehensive “Clean Air Act” that would have empowered local authorities to tackle pollution, specific legislation to ban or heavily restrict domestic wood-burning, measures to clear the most polluting diesel vehicles from roads, binding WHO Air Quality Targets, nor new legislation for monitoring and improving indoor air quality in buildings. We signed Mums for Lungs’ letter but it seems that campaign will live to see another day.

From national to local

Another big event this week was of course local council elections. Our local council, Lambeth, has been a Labour stronghold for the past 20 years until last week, when the Green Party increased their number of seats from 2 to 29. While they have the most seats, the Green Party does not have overall control and so we hope that cross-party alignment over air quality matters can be reached and the progress made to date does not stall. We will be watching closely!

*We realise it’s not up to him, but we’re still disappointed by a painful lack of commitment to the biggest environmental threat to human health.

So this week, we’re very excited to be able to preview the What’s the Matter festival, organised by friends of this blog, Marina Walker and Ruaraidh Dobson. Timed around Clean Air Day on 19 June, it will involve art, data and installations in healthcare and educational settings around London. Marina explains: “After ten years in East London, I’ve developed severe hayfever. Just like the Air Pollution Canary in Julia Godsiff’s artwork, I’ve become acutely sensitive to what’s in the air. The festival aims to make the link between how we feel and the air we breathe clearer — and show what we can do, individually and together, to breathe easier.”

It will feature works by artists we’ve showcased here over the past few years including Julia Godsiff and Miriam Quick and Stefanie Posavec, as well as Kirsty Pringle and Jim McQuaid’s famous stripes and installations from Jingrong Zhang and Fabio Duarte (we’ll have to feature them soon too!) And you don’t have to wait till June - some events start later this month, including an exciting workshop by another friend of this blog, Kayla Schulte. Sign up on the website for updates!

And if one is not enough, we have updates from the amazing Knitting the Air project, run by Caroline Murray, whom we have featured regularly here. Over two and a half years, 132 people from Poplar, Bow and east London spent thousands of hours knitting air pollution data about the air they breathe. The team is planning an exhibition in September to present the result of their efforts: a 13-metre textile that visualises air quality across a whole year.

The data comes from two Breathe London Community sensors located in Poplar, near the A12 and Blackwall Tunnel approach. By translating scientific data into something tangible and handmade, created by the communities this data affects, it invites people to explore abstract numbers as something lived, breathed and felt.

Caroline says: “This exhibition is also about voices. A new film shines a spotlight on the knitters themselves, the residents who gave thousands of hours of their time to make this work, sharing what it meant to knit data about the air in their own neighbourhood, and what that process revealed about the place they call home. Their reflections sit alongside more than 400 responses gathered from the wider community, capturing what air quality means to people across east London. They bring everyday experiences of air pollution into focus, highlighting their concerns for their health, hopes for change and a deep appreciation that clean air is fundamental to life.”

Canvas and cream

We managed to get to this amazing exhibition in Forest Hill before it closed in February, celebrating the life of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah and making the case for the Clean Air (Human Rights) Act (Ella’s Law). We completely failed over winter to get to this exhibition - See the Unseen, which looked great too. In a way though, if there are so many events just in South London on air pollution that we can’t keep up, something must be going right in raising awareness.

With today’s local council vote, we were quite taken with this quote on BBC News about young people’s concerns in Lambeth: “I’m really worried about stuff like air pollution and coal emission rates and how that’s going to impact us - how am I going to live in the world and study and grow in a world where I can’t even breathe?” Kermarley Danclair. If it’s top of Kermarley’s agenda then it should be top of everyone’s.

And provided by… you guessed it, Air Aware Labs!

After writing about the impact of high ozone last year, we were very excited with the event organisers contacted us about bringing data and recommendations to runners this year. We provided insights on best routes and times for elites in the run up to the event, a bespoke app for all runners and information for the big screen at the Green team start.

Air constellations

Of the 59,000 runners, we were particularly cheering on a few with connections to this blog! Mete Coban, Deputy Mayor covering environment, was running and posted on air quality before the start. Hannah Cox, officially superwoman, not only due to completing 100 marathons in 100 days across India, was running because she hadn’t run enough (!) - and she’s on the final push to raise £1m for the planet. And Air Aware Labs’ chief scientist and co-founder, Will’s, father was also out on the track despite injuries!

A good reminder of why we were there to raise awareness of air quality:

→ Every 1 µg/m³ rise in fine particulate matter slows male runners by 32 seconds and female runners by 25 seconds (Brown University, 2.5m runners analysed)
→ Marathon runners inhale 10–20× more air per minute than at rest
→ 46% of the global population lives in areas where particulate matter is high enough to cancel out the health benefits of regular exercise.

Ozone-d out

Luckily in London, the road closures and general environmental improvements have made it a relatively clean and health route. This year the ozone was looking potentially high again but came down with the change of weather before the day - we will be analysing this more over the coming weeks.

Where next? One of the pictures above shows us chatting to a colleague working on the Athletics for a Better World standard which includes air quality. This is a new requirement for global events so we are hoping and expecting London to be in the vanguard.

Thanks to our friends at Solve the School Run, we organised a Show and Tell last week to demonstrate to local council candidates (for the election on 7 May) the dangers our children face. We are happy to say that all leading parties are committed to implementing the school street. It was covered in the Brixton Buzz!

We were also super-proud parents, as our daughter (indoctrinated in arguments about clean air) did a piece to camera to rival the politicians! This should be coming out in a social media video soon - we will share it. Many other children shared their experiences of the busy road and how they love seeing friends as they took active travel routes to school.

Where next?

So how to build on this? For our local school, we are looking at how to make the road outside the school the nicest possible environment - with planters, seats and maybe even some art work. There is also a much wider conversation to be had with the school about the environment within the school plot - effective greening for playgrounds (sometimes easier said than done) and improved indoor environments (new guidance came out a few months ago).

And then the remainder of schools in Lambeth and beyond. Many local parents are really concerned about the reversals and challenges to plans for the cycle lane extension and extra zebra crossings near to Rosendale School. If you are local, there is a rally tomorrow (Friday 24 April) at 8.30am at the Wigwam Toy Shop SE21 8EZ.

The post is the problem

For those wondering why no local air quality data in this blog for a while… We are still waiting for the Council to work out who is allowed to go up a ladder to replace our Breathe London monitoring node on the now famous lamp-post in Brixton. Soon, we hope!

*From Sometimes by Sheenagh Pugh. The next line is: “Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.”

The main difference in how your home is heated with an ASHP is that the temperature of the water circulating in radiators is generally a lot lower. A typical water temperature for a condensing gas boiler is 65C, whereas for an ASHP it is 45C. For us, this meant that we had to upgrade some of our radiators to higher output models, but fortunately only three of them. Another consequence of this is that rooms will generally take longer to heat up, but in practice we didn’t really notice much difference. I have heard it said that heat pumps often result in a “comfortable” temperature at home, and I’d agree with this choice of word: with our old gas system there were times when we’d feel cold and then turn up the temperature, and then a while later feel too hot, and turn it down again. With the heat pump the temperature is a lot steadier, and well, more comfortable.

Another difference is that hot water is heated overnight and stored in a 250 litre tank, which took some getting used to compared to our old combi boiler, where hot water is on-demand. We were a bit worried that we’d be running out of hot water all the time, but this has only happened once, when we were getting used to it. And as a benefit, shorter showers do help to unblock the queue to the bathroom! It is possible to schedule more water heating cycles if necessary, and there is always an immersion heater that can be turned on if you’re in a real hurry.

A gas boiler is around 80% efficient (for every unit of energy you put in, you get back 0.8 units of heat) but ASHPs are around 400% efficient - one unit of energy put in produces 4 units of heat. However, as the cost of electricity is about 4x that of gas, there isn’t much of a cost saving. This is where another neat bit of kit comes in: a storage battery. Flexible electricity tariffs allow us to charge up the battery overnight when electricity is cheap and draw down on it during the day, when electricity is more expensive. Estimating the cost savings is a bit tricky, but it should help bring down the running cost of the heat pump considerably.

But how does all this help reduce air pollution? In 2024 the top two sources of fine particulate pollution were road transport and domestic combustion, and so moving from burning fuel can help reduce air pollution. And reducing the reliance on natural gas in favour of renewable energy can improve energy resilience, a very topical issue.

Wrap up well

And finally, the other important step to take is to reduce the heat loss from your property, and so the team at Warmdwell increased our loft insulation, insulated under the wooden floorboards downstairs and Sacha ordered some acrylic secondary double glazing to reduce the thermal loss of some old single-glazed windows.

We’re pretty happy with the end result so far: it took a lot of research and planning to find the right supplier and make sure what we got would do the job. Then eight days of multiple teams onsite at the same time installing the heat pump and insulation was quite stressful at times. Hopefully when winter comes around, we’ll have a warm home that is energy efficient as well as reducing our contribution to air pollution and climate change.

We’ll do an update in a year with some data on how it is working out!

Respiratory health:

• even smokeless fuels embed particulate matter in the lungs

• oxidative stress and reduced lung function in a study in Hong Kong

• indoor air quality and asthma/COPD

• hospital admissions for acute respiratory illness in Delhi

• GP visits in the England due to asthma attacks

• which elements of particulate matter are most likely to trigger asthma attacks

• how pollution impacts allergies and asthma

• voting patterns linked to respiratory health due to air pollution.

Cognitive and mental health:

• impacts on neurological health, particularly in low and middle-income countries

• how improving air quality could improve mental health in Europe

• link to anxiety disorders and schizophrenia from a study in Rome

• Alzheimer risk in older American population, Lewy body dementia risk and an overview of dementia risk

• childhood exposure to wood-burning linked to cognitive decline in later life

• exposure during midlife impacting aging brain health

• cognitive performance from long-term exposure

• link to poor sleep.

Particular conditions and diseases:

• link to glycolipid metabolic disorders, to obesity and to type 1 diabetes (this is an older study but the evidence around this is limited)

• overview of cancer risks, lung cancer in non-smokers and harm to the heart during breast cancer treatment

• potential link to brain tumours

• link to eye health and cataracts, and particular impacts on children

• cardiovascular health in young adults, heart tissue scarring and overall cardiovascular disease burden

• eczema in adults

• link to osteoporosis (also an older study)

• impact on adverse pregnancy outcomes.

Overall health and fitness:

• risk from particulate matter exposure while exercising, differentiated between male and female athletes

• summary of impact from physical activity and particular evidence on marathons

• link to heart rate variability in children and frailty in older populations

• childhood hospital admissions and air pollution episodes

• wood-burning linked to 2,500 deaths a year in the UK

• 95% of air pollution-attributable deaths globally for adults over 60 are due to non-communicable diseases

• overall guidance on health risks in Europe

• how to understand the mix of air pollution and its impact.

Forgive us if we don’t attempt to summarise all the findings of these studies. We have included some where the link between pollution and health impact is not statistically significant, but this might just be due to sample size in the study. Taken together they show an extraordinary set of health impacts - particularly from particulate matter - which should make anyone sit up and take notice.

We keep an organised list of all the evidence we come across, organised by theme, on our website.

So what should we do?

Louise was lucky enough to join the Clean Air Champions conference a few weeks back at Imperial College. The Clean Air Programme closed on 31 March, so the conference aimed to summarise the understanding reached to date and prioritise research aims for the next phase. The focus was on transdisciplinary research, reaching beyond academia to civil society, policy makers and business.

Above is a still of a video piece that Louise shot with one of the convenors of the conference and friend of this blog, Dr Kayla Schulte. You can see the full video created and compiled by another friend, Marina Walker, here. The conference concluded with five key areas for future evidence and research, which was presented to national funding bodies. We look forward to the outcomes and will report back soon!

Today we launched our new 24/7 tracking feature in AirTrack. This builds on the first version of AirTrack, which linked air pollution levels at an individual’s exact location and offered cleaner routes and insights into when pollution is lower, and could be accessed directly or via Strava, Apple Health and Google Health Connect. Now our AirCoach feature tracks pollution exposure throughout the day and week, taking into account activity rates (when lungs are working harder) and how pollution varies between transport types, indoor environments and the outside world.

It offers lots of cool new features like leaderboards, summaries of your exposure and forecasts to help you choose the best times. But here we wanted to talk a bit about our personal experience of delivering this.

Remembering that Sacha has spent most of his working time on this (other things do crop up like cyber security upgrades), while Louise has mainly been focusing on investment for Air Aware Labs through this period. For previous product development, Louise usually led most of the user research and engagement, whereas this time our colleagues Dan and Lia did most of this. (So the subtext here is: take Sacha’s story rather than Louise’s vaguer recollections!)

So, it went something like this:

• Sacha thought it would be a cool thing to expand AirTrack beyond individual activity tracking, while Louise (alongside Will) was having a more commercial-focused discussion with a potential buyer who describes almost the exact same thing… We guess that’s a good description of how a CTO vs a CEO comes at product development, and in this case it luckily pointed the whole leadership team in the same direction!

• This was round-about September, once we’d launched our Cleaner Routes feature. So the next phase went deep into tech development while we worked out how best to capture the background tracking data (whether a user is in a vehicle, walking, cycling, indoors etc) and link that to air pollution data at the right level of granularity. This also needed to look at how to conserve phone battery life. Louise remembers Sacha sitting on the sofa waving his mobile in the air before heading out for a quick walk around the block at decidedly odd hours! Sacha remembers lots of cool code…

• After that we got into a phase of user testing, as well as running a pilot with our software developers’ (and investor) company in the Philippines. This brought to light what users wanted including use of leaderboards and some way of making sense of the vast amount of data coming through. It also allowed Will to focus in on how to make the scoring make sense now we were moving away from single activities. And on how to estimate indoor air quality (something we will enhance as our first product development task after today!)

• We’re more or less post Christmas now, when we started on more of the user design/experience/interface work. We had used natural language summaries of air pollution data before (since last summer), but we needed to work out how to shift this up a notch, bringing different notifications at different points (eg what does a user need to know that day vs what have their trends shown over a past period). So that was a big one, alongside all the typical stuff of the look and feel of the app - colours, amount of detail, how to move between screens etc.

• Sometime in the depths of winter, Dan (introduced above - our Chief Product Officer) came up with the idea of having something available to users before they had even signed up. So we started figuring out what we offer for the different tiers of subscribers and what information we needed from them to make those tiers work (location data being the crucial one). This was all driven by user feedback; and we went through another round of testing with users - now in a formal beta testing group.

• Something we’d wanted to do for ages was to give forecast air pollution data not just retrospective. Louise was a bit of a bore on that one, having heard it from many users! Luckily Sacha made a new best friend (Claude code) over the last few months and was able to bash out new features such as that in no time (well, less time, and only because the human-built underpinnings of our system, both scientifically and technically, were so strong!)

• The final few weeks have been working on the styling of the app, tweaking the notifications, final decisions on pricing and which users get what, and how we track all the numbers we need for our own analytics. And for Louise, now finally getting properly engaged rather than helicopter view - lots and lots of work with Lia on the marketing plan, build up, onboarding a set of global ambassadors, new website content and more!

Happy to say we are still alive, talking to each other and (we hope) still friends with the rest of the team! As well as those mentioned above, Sacha’s development team (Dan, Roy and Ken) in the Philippines have been fantastic and, along with bringing top-class engineering and design, also brought experiences and perspectives that were quite different from ours in London (for example, in the Philippines, motorbikes are much more common than in the UK and so we added motorbike as a configurable vehicle option).

Hopes and dreams

What are our hopes? Well we already have over 3000 users in over 90 countries, but we hope this takes it even higher - dare we suggest five figure user base in almost all countries by the end of the year? We do want to see strong revenue from what we think is a great premium offer - to ensure the long-term sustainability of the company. But most of all we want to see people accessing this data - a level of air pollution insight we think doesn’t exists elsewhere - and really taking action to protect their health.

Things may be changing. In January, the government brought out a road safety strategy which mentions (p34) concerns about SUVs and notes the action taken in Cardiff, as the first city in the UK to charge higher parking charges (as we’ve covered before, Lambeth is also considering this). The strategy commits the government to collaborating with stakeholders and vehicle manufacturers to further understand safety concerns.

Zeroing in

In London, the Mayor is going further. The recent Vision Zero plan states the problem clearly: “oversized models, such as large SUVs, make it harder for drivers to see people walking and cycling nearby”. And “the safety implications are stark. In the last 20 years, collisions involving people walking or cycling and oversized vehicles has increased from four per cent to 26 per cent.” But like the national strategy, it only commits to: “continue to research the impact of the largest SUV private vehicles in London. This will involve analysing the safety risks posed by oversized cars and defining the category more clearly.”

We see the impacts every day outside our local primary school. Luckily, the school street should solve many issues from September. Meanwhile, the school council has started a poster campaign about dangerous parking. While we don’t equate larger cars with bad parking, the risk is multiplied if they are parked that way. And the feeling that the only way to protect one’s family is to encase them in bigger and bigger cars is contributing to the air quality problems at the school and elsewhere. Our friends at Solve the School Run have set out a constructive 3-point plan for the upcoming local elections - please support this where possible!

A deputation from the deputy

We wonder how many out-of-place cars, Mete Coban (Deputy Mayor) and Councillor Rezina Chowdhury (Sustainable Lambeth and Clean Air) might have noticed when they came on a visit this week to see the work of the community gardening group we are part of. The most recent project by the group was to install a rain garden, which is capable of dispersing hundreds of thousands of litres of water per year that would otherwise end up in the river Effra (which is now a sewer that runs beneath our street), helping to reduce the risk of flooding of nearby areas. And the bread-and-butter of the group - the urban greening of otherwise concrete and tarmac’ed areas - helps to reduce low-level ozone. (We hope Mete doesn’t think we’re stalking him after Louise spoke alongside him at the Women’s Health Horizons conference!)

We have had a run of a few blogs on policy issues recently. We promise we will get back to our core purpose of providing data from our Brixton monitoring node soon… but we are currently in a mini-limbo while the node is being replaced and it’s stuck in a health and safety / risk assessment loop before someone can scale the lamp-post to do the job! We’ve also been collecting latest academic evidence on health impacts and will do a round up too (while trying to stay positive!)

Meanwhile a mini-promo from Air Aware Labs - we will be providing air quality data at the London Marathon this year! More to say after we’ve launched our latest AirTrack feature, AirCoach, next Thursday!

We submitted commentary to the draft AQAP back in December and it was interesting to see how it had changed to the final submission. The Council is doing a lot of things well - a reduction in nitrogen dioxide breaches on Brixton Road from 883 legal limit breaches in 2015 to zero in 2024 is a genuine achievement; forty-five School Streets is substantial delivery; and commitments to a community air quality forum help engage residents of Lambeth. But in Sacha’s oral presentation to the committee he highlighted five things we think the Council could do better:

• Procurement: The draft plan contained five mandatory clean air requirements for the Council’s £500 million annual procurement - covering zero-emission vehicles, cargo bike deliveries, ULEZ compliance, fleet optimisation, and freight consolidation. In the final plan, all five have been deleted and replaced with a single action about “exploring” KPI development. Procurement is the Council’s most powerful lever, and it has chosen not to use it.

• Resource allocation: The plan is undermined by a new caveat stating every action is “contingent on resource allocation.” This makes the AQAP an aspiration document, not an action plan. The Council needs to establish which actions actually have confirmed funding.

• PM2.5: The plan acknowledges levels remain above WHO targets and that brake and tyre wear is a significant source, but there is no dedicated fine particulate matter (PM2.5) reduction strategy. Electric vehicles help with nitrogen dioxide (NO2) but do not solve the particulate problem. And annual averages mask harmful spikes - our Brixton data shows approximately 70 WHO daily guideline breaches per year despite an acceptable annual average.

• Data: The Council monitoring platform lacks open API access, which prevents communities and researchers from building tools that drive behaviour change.

• Targets: Some targets have been quietly reduced. Tree planting cut by two-thirds, and cycle stores on estates halved to just 30 for a borough of 300,000 people.

We didn’t receive a response in the meeting (nor were we expecting one), but there were some interesting questions raised by councillors and answered by Council Officers:

• Improving public transport. In order to provide a viable alternative to cars, the Council needs to improve public transport options. Feedback on the Superloop service has been very positive, and Lambeth wants to see more bus investment and improvements to making bus travel more attractive, for example bus shelter and bus improvements. A 6-12 month feasibility study funded by the Department for Transport for a lift at Loughborough Junction station is going ahead, in order to improve accessibility and rail uptake. And as an avid cyclist, Sacha picked up on a small comment that a Santander Bikes docking station might be coming to Herne Hill!

• School Streets. How will Lambeth tackle School Streets where the school is on a main road and hard to implement? The Council is working with Mayor of London on a trial programme to install air purifiers inside schools. And what about School Streets for secondary schools? Lambeth want to complete primary schools first.

• Healthy Neighbourhoods. Concerns have been raised that schemes to calm traffic within neighbourhoods could lead to diversion of traffic to boundary roads. The Council has commissioned research on this. So far, the research shows significant reduction within, and no significant increase on, boundary roads. This forms part of the standard report that is produced before recommending that Health Neighbourhood are converted to a permanent status.

Action drives data drives action

We’ve now had three experiences of local democracy in as many months - firstly Louise attending the Council meeting on this Plan, then the Budget Committee with our School Streets deputation, and now this Committee. All quite different experiences and a great education in local democracy… but we think we might get back into our comfort zone with data now.

Speaking of which: at Air Aware Labs we are building up to our launch on 2 April of AirCoach, a new feature in AirTrack which gives 24/7 pollution exposure tracking. Stay tuned!