Residents march on council HQ demanding cleaner air in Northampton

Last Thursday around thirty local residents staged a town-centre protest against poor air quality, following the publication of a study showing that Northampton has the worst airborne pollution of any UK location.

The protest—organised by the recently formed campaign group Clean Air Northampton—focused on the damage done by polluted air to newborn babies, and on highlighting the estimated number of Northamptionians killed by poor air quality over the last year.

Members of the group gathered outside the General Hospital’s Barratt Birth Centre, then marched to the offices of West Northants Council in Angel Square where they laid 100 wooden crosses.

Twenty years ago the air quality in Northampton was measured as being so bad that the Borough Council was legally obliged to take action, but since then it has done nothing according to Clean Air Northampton.

They state that the town’s poor ranking in air quality—much worse than big cities such as London and Birmingham—is the result of inaction by successive councils.

Councillors Danielle Stone and Fartun Ismail spoke outside the council offices in support of the protest, which was organised as part of Clean Air Day—a collection of annual events staged around the UK to highlight the problem of poor air quality.

“There are some easy wins for reducing air pollution,” Councillor Stone said.

“Stop cars idling; create car free spaces round schools, hospitals and care homes; and ban diesel buses and taxis,” she said. “If West Northants Council has the will, we have the way.”

Data on air quality is gathered by numerous measuring stations around the UK, including those in Castilian Terrace, Derngate and Weston Favell, and then used to produce comparative figures for UK towns and cities.

To illustrate the harm done through breathing airborne particulates, experts recently used this data to calculate the number of cigarettes the resident of a location would have to smoke to do the same degree of health damage as simply breathing.

“Breathing Northampton’s air—with the current levels of particulate contamination—has the same health outcome over a year as smoking 189 cigarettes,” said Dave Pearson, 63, a local resident and organiser of the protest.

“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.”