We are, of course, in the midst of an air pollution crisis which, like every other threat to our health these days, is ‘worse than smoking’. According to the Royal College of Physicians, everyone in Britain is effectively smoking at least one cigarette a day, rising to many more in the most polluted cities. What’s more, as Bloomberg once put it, London has a ‘Dirty Secret: Pollution Worse than Beijing’s’. And London’s air pollution has ‘been at illegal levels since 2010’, according to the New York Times.
Serious though the problem may be — I’ll take Public Health England’s word for it that air pollution contributes to between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths per year — the hyperbole misses something important: that the air in Britain has become steadily cleaner over the past 70 years. I can still smell London as it was in the early 1970s. I remember my childhood visits and how my mother would insist on washing my hair as soon as we returned, the water in the basin turning black afterwards.
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