Read the stories from United Kingdom

I live in London close to the South Circular which is a single lane A road. Since the implementation of LTNs, the health of myself and my children has been significantly impacted.

A year ago, the local authority created low traffic neighbourhoods which pushed traffic from 2 residential areas on to my road. There are 4 schools, a youth centre and a care home on this road alone. The air quality which was poor to begin with has dramatically worsened and the council provides no baseline data or meaningful monitoring to assess the impact. I can no longer work at home due to excess noise which is not constant throughout the day and night (5am-10/11pm), I cannot open windows to allow air through my home and myself and my children have poor quality sleep, all of which impacts our family quality of life. Local councillors are not interested because they now live within these quiet enclaves and mums for lungs are disappointingly similar. There is a chronic lack of empathy towards those who now suffer worsening health as a result of these schemes which are supposed to deliver clean air and less traffic - it does neither of these things. They discriminate against the less well off, the most vulnerable and are creating a respiratory health crisis. I have gone from a relatively healthy person to someone who is having to have hospital appointments to ascertain why I struggle to breathe. Where I was active and would walk locally to visit family and friends, I will now drive as I have to walk through roads which are now eerily quiet and I dear for my safety, having been followed and taunted with ' no one will hear or see you'. It impacts on how often I visit my elderly parents and it adds to the isolation of the elderly as well as the additional traffic on their road. It's soul destroying. I fear for my children's health as a result and moving away is my only option. Thanks to these LTNs, the value of my home has been impacted which makes moving and staying close to family impossible. I'm stressed, angry and depressed that clean air is becoming something only the better off can have.

We live on a super busy road, busier than ever because of a local ltn (low traffic neighbourhood). Our kids walk by the heavy traffic every day on their way to school. Little lungs are impacted by the pollution, this doesn’t feel good at all. Coughing and asthma has increased in our family

We can only live for 3 minutes without air.....

As a physicist, I once wrote an essay on the changing climate resulting from our industrial progress, long before it had become so globally devastating. As an academic, I have spoken to 10’s of thousands of students, children, and institutions on the use of STEAM subjects and education to protect the increasingly fragile environment which sustains our very survival. But it was only as an artist and more importantly a mother, that it became so personal and so visceral, that I was compelled to pioneer pollution-absorbing sculptures and public installations. Art that shares the narrative that not only does 1 in 10 humans now need an asthma puffer to take a breath, but also the story of how it affects the smallest of creatures that pollinate the plants that become 1 in 3 mouthfuls of our food.

5 years ago, my now 23-year-old son, had a major asthma attack. We had never experienced that before and sitting in A&E in Lewisham all night watching him struggle on a nebuliser made me think about creating work to share how it feels when an invisible enemy takes hold of all our precious children. The very children inheriting a broken world they did not create.

A year later, I was commissioned by Euston Town and The Mayor of London Fund to create a piece for one of the most polluted roads in the country. There is a reason synchronicity is one of my favourite terms; not long after I met a company making a ceramic, 3 kg of which can clean an average-sized room of nitrogen dioxide (NOx) pollution. NOx is the toxic yellow haze emitted by everything from hobs to vehicles and the thing we see as a layer on city skylines. ‘Breathe’ was recently installed above the Camden People’s Theatre, at a time when Camden now has the densest number of air detectors anywhere in the world. And last year, we installed ‘Flower Girl who will awaken upon the buzzing or the bees’ in the Horniman Museum Gardens to help pollinators find their flowers on the highly toxic South Circular. Only this week I met a grandmother who told me she visits regularly with her granddaughter to see whether her eyes had opened yet.

That story alone was enough to remind me of the power of storytelling.

As communities, we once drew on cave walls long before we had the language to tell the stories that would protect our children and sustain future generations. My work reminds us that an equitable future, in which clean air is a fundamental human right, is defined by our past; a past in which we lived in harmony with all things.

Walking to the school gates used to be dreadful... Many drivers leaving their engines running and my children, barely waist high, at just the right height to inhale toxic fumes from exhausts. No wonder asthma and respiratory disease are on the rise. We must do better for our young people.

Me and my four children live close to a large, main road in Glasgow. We love living in a city with all the opportunities to connect with community and culture that brings and enjoy getting about by walking and cycling. I worry, however, that the children are breathing in too much toxicity. My youngest has asthma and sometimes really struggles to breathe.

When I was pregnant with him, I attended an ante-natal appointment at a different clinic to usual. To get there I had to walk 20 minutes up a busy main road. The midwife checked my breathing and assumed I was a heavy smoker (I've never smoked). After some discussion, we both realised my toxin levels were so high because of walking next to busy traffic immediately before the appointment. I feel so angry on behalf of all the children and developing lungs growing up next to that road.

Lockdown brought some beautiful respite but when restrictions started to ease and the amount of traffic increased again you could smell the traffic fumes in the air. It catches at the back of your throat sometimes. A couple of years ago I lost a good friend to lung cancer. She was in her late-40s, such a healthy person and keen cyclist. I often wonder if cycling behind toxic-spewing exhausts is what killed her.

I have always had rhinitis and over the last few years I’ve developed mild asthma which is triggered on high pollution days. We commute to school and nursery by bike and the kids are in a trailer. When we have to cycle behind buses or old cars it is very difficult to breathe and the boys really dislike it. I wish we had much cleaner air, proper cycling infrastructure so that kids and adults can safely commute without putting their health at risk and without having to sit behind idling cars and buses at every traffic light or junction.