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Line up for the fight to improve air quality
• IT ’S time to line up behind our councillors who are concerned about the unhealthy quality of the air in Camden.
Councillor Paul Braithwaite's letter (January 22) about the poisons and deadly particulates we’re breathing – which our children are breathing – would concentrate anyone’s mind.
He tells us that the European Commission reports that London has 200km of toxic roads and that we in Camden have some of them. Think what the levels must be in the Euston Road and around King’s Cross. Cllr Braithwaite states that in those 200km of roads London has just three pollution-measuring stations, compared with New York’s 150. Only one is in Camden, in Russell Square, with another soon to be in action at Swiss Cottage, so he asks us all to work with our Primary Care Trust to set up more measuring stations.
He is himself already trying to organise with the James Wigg practice to have one at the new Kentish Town Health Centre.
What it reveals will be particularly interesting because it’s a residential neighbourhood near the polluted Kentish Town Road.
It’s reassuring that a councillor is asking us all to pull together and giving us a central point through which residents can communicate problems and possible solutions to one another.
I had a first frisson of anxiety about bad air back in 1956, when I was young and ill-paid in New York.
I used to venture into Fifth Avenue in search of a cheap lunch and one day jay-walked behind one of the venerable buses just as it shifted gear and moved off in a cloud of exhaust.
Knowing no better I breathed it all in and promptly felt sick and dizzy. It was patently poisonous and I never again took a breath near a bus.
About the same time I walked down a street in Greenwich Village and, passing an air conditioner that protruded from a ground-floor window, I noticed the heat it was pumping out. “No wonder this place is so hot in summer,” I said to my companion. Neither of us foresaw the plight of the polar bears but we were uneasy about the effects of streets full of unnaturally hot air and had no idea to whom to mention our concern. Back then, there was no one focused on the issue.
This is a different city and a different time. The buses apparently are not as polluting as they were because the former London mayor ensured that all London buses have particulate filters as well as having introduced the clear air zone which fines dirty lorries coming inside the M25.
Our cool climate saves us from an air conditioner in every flat, but there are still the huge office blocks and our own gas boilers and, above all, the traffic.
Residents need to get engaged with pressuring our primary care trust to work creatively with Camden’s all-party sustainability task force to find new ways of reducing those deadly tiny sooty PM2.5 particulates.
PRISCILLA MCBRIDE
Chalcot Square, NW1
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