Air pollution may be invisible, but for Jamila Bolton-Gordon, its effects have been impossible to ignore. Growing up in Ladbroke Grove, she watched the health of her family deteriorate across generations - a pattern she came to understand was the predictable consequence of living in one of London's most polluted neighbourhoods.
Today, she is a community champion for AWAIR, an Imperial College London project that places real-time air quality displays in public spaces across the capital.
"My mum was a teacher in a nursery school under the West Way, and I sent my daughter there when I went back to work," she explains. "Her health deteriorated to a point that she was hospitalised. Had I known that it was the motorway contributing to her physical demise, I would have pulled her out."
Her story, and that of fellow Londoner Elizabeth Wan, who describes her anxiety of raising children in a city where the air itself poses a health risk, anchors a new film from Imperial's Grantham Institute, Inside Story: The Fight to Clean Up London's Air.
The film, the latest in the Grantham Institute's Inside Story series, spotlights the work of Imperial's Environmental Research Group. It charts how decades of rigorous science have changed the way London understands, measures, and tackles air pollution; how research, community voices and policy action have transformed London's air quality; and why the work is far from over.
