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A recently published survey, using data from monitoring stations around the UK, has established that Northampton has the worst air quality in the UK. A group of local residents has now decided to challenge decades of council inaction on the issue.

On Thursday 15th June, a group of Northampton residents will march on council offices demanding action to reduce air pollution in the town.

The protest—organised by local pressure group Clean Air Northampton as part of this year’s national Clean Air Day—will begin at noon outside the General Hospital’s Barratt Birth Centre, to highlight the damage that poor air quality does to the health of babies.

It will end outside the offices of West Northants Council in Angel Square, where wooden crosses will be laid in memory of Northamptonians killed by poor air quality over the last year.

The protest was spurred by a recent study of air quality which shows that Northampton is the worst place in the UK for airborne pollution.

Air quality is measured at numerous stations around the UK, including ones covering Northampton in Castilian Terrace, Derngate and Weston Favell. Air quality experts Housefresh use this data to produce comparative figures for UK towns and cities, illustrating the harm done through breathing polluted air by calculating the number of cigarettes you’d have to smoke to do the same degree of health damage.

Even big cities such as Leeds and London are doing better than Northampton at providing cleaner air for their residents, as the below list of the ten UK locations with the worst air quality shows:

1. Northampton 2. Nottingham 3. Bristol 4. Southampton 5. Kingston upon Hull 6. Cardiff 7. Southend-on-Sea 8. Norwich 9. Leeds 10. London

A previous protest at Northampton's poor air quality saw the artful deployment of gas masks.

Twenty years ago the air quality in Northampton was deemed so bad that the Borough Council was legally obliged to take action, but since then it has done nothing. Local resident and protest organiser Dave Pearson, 63, says that Northampton’s residents have had enough.

“Breathing Northampton’s air—with the current levels of particulate contamination—has the same health outcome over a year as smoking 189 cigarettes,” he says. “Or to put it another way, two days after being born in our town a baby will have breathed the equivalent of smoking its first cigarette.”

The march is part of Clean Air Day, a collection of annual events staged nationwide to heighten awareness of the problem of air pollution in the UK.

Residents march on West Northamptonshire Council's head office in Northampton to demand cleaner air