After posts on India, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Germany and Netherlands, we thought we’d take it back home this week and look at what is going on in Lambeth.
Lambeth has recently published its annual air quality report. This is a detailed report covering various monitoring sites in the Borough (though not our Breathe London node, for bureaucratic reasons). It sets out progress on Lambeth actions covering school streets, bus fleets, low traffic zones, construction and everything else - however, only until the end of 2023. Louise met Councillor Rezina Chowdhury (Member of Sustainable Lambeth and Clean Air) recently, who set out her recent work on healthy neighbourhoods and kerbside strategy.
We have written regularly on school streets, having been involved in the very early pilots in 2019. Last week, new guidance was rolled out nationally on this. We are waiting with baited breath for more updates from the Council (or indeed our daughter’s school) on our local schools. This is remarkably hard to get hold of since we saw the original announcement about a year ago. The Council is rolling out the plans in batches but finding out what is planned, when, is tricky; and our local school appears to have had no information either.
Coming up roses
We are very pleased, however, to see the roll out of a school street at Rosendale School in September. We have worked with the local group as part of Breathe London and know how hard they have campaigned. Theirs was extra complicated, with decisions needed across Lambeth and Southwark, and involvement of local private schools. We are sure Rosendale pupils enjoyed walk to school month this year! We hope they will write more about their experiences for this blog soon.
So what impact is all this having on our local monitoring? We raised the alarm a few weeks ago about levels shooting up. Unfortunately November has continued with poor air quality. The node is showing daily breaches of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) levels almost every day, and of Particulate Matter (PM2.5) around half of the days.
News from the Labs
In our Air Aware Labs work, we have been invited to join the Lambeth Climate Partnership, which will allow us to contribute to these outcomes. And on the other side of town, we are listed as a resource in the Year of Clean Air for Camden Schools. We were also extremely excited to win a prize from GoodTech Ventures for our work - here is a picture of Louise and Will with the Deputy Mayor of London Howard Dawber.
