A living, breathing ecosystem

Blooming marvellous

Being part of the Breathe London community means not just being able to access top quality data and understanding on our local air quality, but also being part of a real community. It’s actually a community of communities - a veritable ecosystem. There are 60 local groups across 24 London boroughs working to raise awareness, campaign, and ultimately make the air cleaner for residents. Some top name choices: Haringey fixers, R-Urban, Save our Safer Streets, HyPER (Hyde Park) and Rainham Against Pollution.

So when the opportunity comes up to join an in-person meeting of these groups, Sacha and Louise have to fight it out. Last night Louise won, and attended an event at the Mithraeum Bloomberg Space (this actually houses some Roman ruins but Louise was too busy chatting to check them out). This was a great celebration of what the community has achieved - from presenting air pollution data in knitting to lego, and campaigning for school streets to major regeneration projects. You can read about it in the annual report (see p22 and p30 for nice little references to our work).

Shirley Rodrigues, Deputy Major, Priya Shankar, Bloomberg Philanthropies and George Korchinsky, Friends of Limehouse

We were also delighted to get a shout out for our data visualisation work and our website. Sacha spent his time wisely last night and finished overhauling the Air Aware website to make it a lot more usable and also make it easier to add new features in the future. A small (but hopefully very useful) improvement is that different parts of the website show up in the address bar, so you can send out links to a particular node - perfect when sending out links to community groups or other interested parties. For example, this is a link directly to our Brixton node. We have also incorporated the Air Aware Wrapped 2023 reports for nodes as links too - here's ours!

The new Air Aware website. So fresh, so clean!

Thank you for all the feedback on the website - it's great to get suggestions about what features would be useful. If there are any new features that you would like to see, please visit the feature board and let us know what you would like to see.

Centenairy

The evening also culminated in a substack milestone for us: our 100th subscriber! And not just anyone: a fellow enthusiast from the excellent Clean Air Fund. We were aiming for 100 within a year and we’ve hit it in 11 months. Bonuses all round! Thank you to all our subscribers.. and bottle of clean air in the virtual post to you all :)