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Cleaning up

February 01 2026

Progress takes time and continued effort. Take, for example, the cleanliness of London: it is a constant battle, but one that saves lives. By André Rostant

I was born in The Smoke in 1963, literally. We would craft clay ashtrays as juniors, progressing to metal ones in secondary school, proudly setting them before our parents on coffee tables in the acrid, dingy grey-purple gloom of our yellow-ceilinged, brown-walled living rooms. We travelled on buses and trains filled with thick smoke, shopped, sat in cafes or, as we grew, pubs and clubs shrouded in a fug that firefighters would rightly don breathing apparatus to enter nowadays.

Everywhere seemed sooty, or grubby sepia, all the great buildings: St Paul’s, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace. Everything smelled of cigarettes, petrol and unidentifiable burning. And the noise! Traffic thundered, roared, screeched, the air, the ground around shuddering.

Right into the 1970s there were still occasional smoggy days – and this long after the 1956 Clean Air Act. Yet these were times of progress.
As early as the 17th century, London was already a notorious cauldron of haze and noise. In 1661, John Evelyn wrote of “…this horrid smoke which obscures our churches and makes our palaces look old, which fouls our clothes and corrupts the waters”. He had a point; London’s waters were royally ‘corrupted’.  In 1728, Alexander Pope concurred, writing of the River Fleet, which flowed through the most populous heart of The City, carrying its “large tribute of dead dogs to the Thames”, rank with effluent. The capital was rife with waterborne disease, notably recurring cholera epidemics which in 1853/54 alone killed over 10,000 Londoners. And it stank. The Thames, described at the time as “a deadly sewer” by Dickens, smelled so bad that in 1858 Parliament was forced to meet behind curtains soaked in chloride. Hansard reports MPs calling the river “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors”.

Since that 1850s nadir, successive acts of Parliament and measures by local government have made our city cleaner, the 1956 Act alone avoided the death of around 1,600 Londoners each year. Our river has been cleaned up to the extent that it now boasts 125 species of fish, albeit our once plentiful eels are critically endangered.

The greatest threat to London’s environment and public health has long been traffic, chief contributor to the deaths of nearly 4,000 people a year. Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, who succumbed at the age of nine in 2013, is one of them. Ella lived and died in Lewisham, just yards from the South Circular Road. She was the first person in the United Kingdom to have air pollution listed on her death certificate as a cause of death. This was sadly predictable since air quality is typically poorer in areas with the most deprived communities. Studies show the new Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) is saving over a thousand lives a year – mainly those of poor people, children like Ella and the elderly. This initiative, coupled with 20mph speed limits, broader pedestrianisation and traffic calming, has also drastically improved the quality of life for inner-city Londoners, those most exposed to traffic pollution including street beggars, people in wheelchairs, dogs, children and motorists themselves.

Yet many drivers view things differently: on the first day of the ULEZ scheme expansion in 2023 there were heated protests at Downing Street. Elsewhere in London, ULEZ cameras were sprayed with paint, smashed or had wires cut. There emerged a group of anti-ULEZ vigilantes, the self-styled, 'Blade Runners'.

One candidate for London’s 2028 mayoral election would scrap ULEZ, as she doesn’t “think a war on motorists helps anyone”. I personally know people who complain vociferously about speed limits, traffic calming and jams – our average speed in London is around 11mph. Given that the typical car journey here is seven miles, a return to the 30mph speed limit, and depedestrianisation would, with the consequent higher traffic volumes, only save motorists around five minutes a trip. Take a look at your granny, your grandchild, your asthmatic sibling. Which of them would you be happy to watch die struggling for breath for the sake of those five minutes? Which of the thousand individuals saved each year by ULEZ would you be happy to sacrifice?

It is not just thoughtless motorists who are not on board with progress; The shitters are at it again. Chief culprit, private company Thames Water, has been fined hundreds of millions of pounds since it was set up in 1989, for discharging billions of litres of untreated sewage into the Thames, killing fish and threatening our health. In 2025, it brazenly pleaded for permission to carry on pumping out ordure until 2040, to satisfy creditors who will, in return, write off 25% of the company’s debt.

We must be watchful, because, be it by corporate or individual greed, progress in making London a cleaner, healthier place is under constant threat.

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February – March 2026 : Progress

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