Breathe in person

The King's Gambit

We’ve been involved in the Breathe London project for the past few months, and for the first time this week we attended an in-person meet-up. Yes! Meeting people face-to-face, with whom previously we had spent Zoom calls with crackly sound! And it wasn’t just hosted in any old venue, but in the offices of the Crown Estate just south of Piccadilly Circus. More about the venue later, but let’s just say it was fit for the King.

Andrew Grieve and Kayla Schulte starting the event

There were about 40 people there: a mix of first-round groups, second-round groups, and of course Andrew, Kayla, Georgina, Nairat and others from the core Breathe London team.

One of the goals of the event was for the first-round groups to share their experiences - the hits and the misses - with the second-round groups (like us), and give them a bit of a foot up. Here are some of the things we learnt:

• Different ways of engaging decision makers: councils, London Assembly members, MPs and TfL.

• Red routes: TfL is responsible for Red Routes, which cut through boroughs. So councils often defer to TfL for anything to do with Red Routes (such as high levels of pollution). However, councils are still responsible for the health of their residents.

• The desire to engage primary school children, and show them what can be done to improve their air quality.

• The Crown Estate has been involved in improving air quality in central London for decades.

Smogless SW1 - view from Crown Estate offices

We’re really looking forward to the next in-person event, hosted at Breathe London’s partner organisation Bloomberg Philanthropy.

Two for one

We’ve been busy this week. We decided community events are our thing… so went along to the latest meeting about the changeover to Lambeth Council management of Brixton Rec. This is important stuff for us - not just whether they will finally fix the temperature of the showers - but to make sure the installation of our node isn’t impacted by new management. We were reassured that it could still go ahead. So we hope it’s up and running very soon.

Both of these events were good reminders of the importance of community engagement. By the people and for the people.