Will London Finally Get Serious About Air Pollution?

What is wrong with London’s air? Following a warm, sunny, early spring, the U.K. capital’s atmosphere has been a soupy, smoggy mess in recent months, with pollutants detected in the air reaching national maximum levels of pollution alert. Much blame for this has been shouldered by a recent Saharan desert storm that dumped grit and sand over the city, but so poor are conditions in general that Britain’s parliament is now launching an official enquiry. They want to work out why London’s City Hall has done so little to ease the problem and to pinpoint the primary cause of the city's grubby air. Their answer will be interesting, but I’ll hazard an early guess. It probably isn’t desert dust.

Certainly, that hasn’t helped. When a cloud of North African grit blew over London a few weeks back, I woke to find a dusty film covering my windows, as well as the washing I’d hung out on the fire escape to dry. While there’s something romantic about shaking Saharan dust off pajamas that have never left London, there’s nothing romantic about breathing it in. The winds bringing the dust also brought a load of pollution from continental Europe, raising the possibility that some of the U.K.’s particulate overload was part of the cloud swirling around Paris a week or so beforehand.