I’ll come back to the meat of the Greener UK hustings over the next couple of days, but I wanted to tell you about this.
I’d been out in the open air of east Northants most of the morning, and then stood on Wellingborough station platform for a while before getting the train into London. I took the tube to Piccadilly Circus and started walking down Regent Street St James’s towards the Royal Society. After just a few paces I started coughing and felt a tickling sensation at the back of my throat. I coughed a few more times on the descent. I waited outside the venue as I was early (I’m almost always early) and got talking to a former colleague and birder. He started coughing and we talked about the fact that we hadn’t been coughing before coming to London. Inside the venue another conversation turned to coughing and the air quality of central London. And even our host, Clive Anderson mentioned the air when he said the audience was breathless with excitement at the prospect of hearing the politicians’ views – ‘No, that’ll be the poor air quality of London’.
It is often reported that poor air quality costs 40,000 lives in the UK each year, and 9,500 of them in London – these claims are pretty much accurate though there are different ways of looking at the data (see here, here, here).
What is not at question is that air quality in London is chronically and illegally bad.
Client Earth has done a great job in battling with the Conservative government over this matter and it looks to them, and to me (although I’m no expert on this) that the government plans are callously weak and incoherent. In other words, this Tory government is doing the least possible on this subject which is killing its citizens in its capital and elsewhere. Let’s be quite clear – air pollution in London is killing vastly more people than is terrorism. We should combat both and it’s pretty easy to act on the former but this government, again, drags its feet on an environmental issue which affects every Londoner and every visitor to the capital.
If you care about the environment, vote for anyone who can stop the election of a Tory MP on 8 June.
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I noticed the same difference when I visited the museum of London a few months ago walking from the tube station. Atmosphere can’t be brilliant in SWHerts either as the air is always fresher the further you are from London.
For some reason I couldn’t get to comments on green hustings – but wanted to say that we should be working back from what we want from the countryside – an outcome led approach – rather than getting embroiled in the fairness or otherwise of how farmers are paid. We should be paying for the services we need in a fair and open way, and seeing it as a purchase rather than a subsidy.
On the air quality issue, at least London has effective public transport – in contrast to here in Bristol where failure over decades + an ever expanding suburbia has turned the city into a n enormous, pollution emitting car park. And as a starter for a solution here & in London imagine the impact of every diesel vehicle that does under 100 miles a day becoming electric – our street is rarely without a delivery van, engine running of course, and most elderly and smoky.
Who would have thought that a government could be so dumb as to incentivise the use of diesel cars?
Not just in central London but in every major city, and not just in Westminster but close to every arterial road. And come to think of it congested main streets in small or medium sized market towns. If you think pollution in Westminster is bad, try living near the North Circular or the Tyne Tunnel. Coincidentally the areas with the worst pollution are often also areas of deprivation – and those most at risk include primary age school children in playgrounds at break time.
Having said that, there is one other irritant you’d find almost as common as diesel vehicles in Central London – the dispersing seeds of the otherwise lovely London Plane Platanus × acerifolia: “these are an irritant if breathed in, and can exacerbate breathing difficulties for people with asthma” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus_%C3%97_acerifolia). It doesn’t say what time of year they’re shed, but I can recall having a bit of a splutter walking under Plane trees along Victoria embankment a few years ago – it was a breezy day and the seeds were going in my eyes too – and I’m fairly sure it was late spring or early summer.
So I wonder if it might – I only say might – be possible that this contributed to your coughing fit? Though definitely not to the public health emergency caused by air pollution, or to take anything away from the other points you’ve made.
MK – thanks for that comment.
I did wonder whether it might be pollen but although I get hay fever for a few days each year the symptoms were very different from my hay fever. but it’s a possibility. Although plane pollen should be more or less over now according to the infographic on this post.
A quick google reveals that plane leaves and buds are covered by fine leaf hairs which are shed as the leaves mature, and that they are strongly suspected of causing irritation to mucus membranes. What with the hairs, the pollen and the seeds one could imagine this was the plane’s revenge on humans for planting it in filthy cities. Just because they could.
We have some youngish London Planes in Biggleswade and the seed balls were visible today but it didn’t look as though they were dispersing seeds yet. The trees in central London could be a bit ahead of Bedfordshire due to warmer temperatures in the city. Or I could have been talking rubbish.