Hello, Brixton!
Hello! We are Louise and Sacha and we live in Brixton along with our family. Brixton’s a great place to live, but like a lot of places it faces challenges with air pollution. We know that air pollution can have really bad health impacts - especially on kids - and so we wanted to try and do something about it.
School Streets Jessop
We previously worked with Lambeth Council and Mums For Lungs to successfully campaign for the closure of Lowden Road at school drop-off and pick-up time around Jessop Primary school. This is part of the School Streets programme. One of the challenges of this project was to measure how bad the pollution was. The Council provided hand-held air quality monitors, but these were quite hard to use and the results were difficult to interpret. The project was a success, but better data might have helped.
LEYF Brixton
Our youngest daughter goes to nursery at LEYF (London Early Years Foundation) Brixton Rec and we wanted to see if we could improve the air quality. It’s near the A23 which is a very polluted route, but how does that proximity affect the air that they breathe? And how we can make it better?
Breathe London
When we heard about the Breathe London initiative we jumped at the chance to get involved. Breathe London supplies community projects with an air quality monitoring node that measures two key pollutants every hour. The Breathe London network is run by the Environmental Research Group at Imperial College London - the same group who run the London Air Quality Network. The group combines air pollution science, toxicology and epidemiology to determine the impacts of air pollution on health and has over 20 years of experience running large urban air quality monitoring networks.
We applied to host a node at LEYF Brixton and at the end of 2022 learned that we were successful! Since then we have been discussing with the team where to site the node, meeting the other community groups who were awarded nodes and learning lots about air quality monitoring from Andy Grieve and Kayla Schulte at Imperial College.
So, what’s the plan?
Well, the node is not quite born, but it’s in its final trimester and the hospital bag is being packed :). We hope to get it installed in the coming weeks (you’ll be the first to know!) and to start analysing the data. We want this data to be not just of interest to data geeks and interested parents, but also the wider Brixton community. The Rec is in the heart of Brixton and is used by over 2000 people every day - many coming to improve their fitness but is the air quality also damaging it? We hope our node will galvanise community interest in improving our air quality.
We plan to use this blog to keep you updated on developments at the monitoring site. We also want to discuss policy issues (Lambeth has just launched a new Air Quality Action plan) and talk about what individuals and families can do to make improvements for themselves and their communities.
very noice