This is the first Clean Air Day since we’ve been running this blog where we’ve organised an event (last year, very happy to join other people’s rides and walks!) Organising events is not for the faint hearted… and this one hasn’t actually happened yet!
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!
We were touched that Marina, winner of the storytelling prize wrote this about this blog: A particular highlight of the evening was catching up with Sacha Manson-Smith and Louise Thomas, who got the silver in the Storytelling category. Years ago, I came across their blog. I was immediately struck by its wit, determination and the level of fact-checking. It felt like there was an editorial team behind it, but instead, there were two frustrated parents trying to navigate the realities of air pollution. Since then, they have transformed that passion into Air Aware Labs – an app helping people understand and reduce their exposure to air pollution in their daily lives.