Everybody has a story. Have you seen the ‘I love clean air’ blue hearts from Islington Clean Air Parents which have been spreading around our streets during the Covid-19 lockdown? Find out more about this new campaigning group set up by Lucy Facer and friends. Interview with Nicola Baird
Islington Faces’ favourite graffiti at Highbury Corner is also loved by Lucy Facer, co-founder of Islington Clean Air Parents. (c) LF
Lucy Facer is having a busy lockdown. She’s in charge of a 3-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter, working from home, landscaping the garden and ramping up her clean air work around Islington. Fortunately, she’s in a sanguine state of mind explaining that her busy life, “keeps me from worrying about the whole situation or the stress of being at home by yourself.”
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Lucy lives on Liverpool Road, just near Highbury & Islington station and is cross that the endless works and changes to Highbury Corner have made such a difference to traffic in her road. “It’s become the Highbury bypass,” she says. “The council will have to do something, but it is so frustrating as they say it’s Transport for London’s responsibility. I am permanently trying to get the council to take notice, because it’s dangerous now that there are more cars coming down here than Upper Street. It’s terrible. And now we are in lockdown some drivers are speeding, so we need more traffic calming measures to be implemented.”
Islington Clean Air Parents is a small campaigning group packing quite a punch.
It was set up just over a year ago after Lucy started looking around in Islington for any clean air groups. “I felt like something had to be done and was in other boroughs. I couldn’t quite believe there was nothing here. I started attending various talks and decided we needed to focus on children being the most vulnerable group to help people take action. Children are more important than us adults driving our cars, so I wanted to start something that linked clean air and parents. At a clean air talk I heard Helena Farstad ask a question, I approached her and put the idea to her, so we then pushed ahead together with Rachel Swynnerton and Miranda Irwin. Together we co-founded the group and set about contacting all the schools and PTAs (parent teacher associations) to start to attract more members. Our first aim was to build a network of parents across Islington – so that a parent from every school (there are about 60), would be able to communicate air pollution issues.”
Very quickly Lucy discovered that campaigning takes up hours. “It’s the balance between attracting members and campaigning. Almost at once we had to respond to various policy documents from the council, go to council meetings and lobby the council about the poor air pollution data found outside our schools, so I found I was very busy campaigning.”
“My Dad was quite a campaigner, so quite a normal thing to see in my household, but until now I’d never had an issue I felt passionately about,” says Lucy who publishes Time & Leisure magazine in south west London. “But with clean air I felt it had to be done and no one else was doing it – we needed a group to build that voice.”
“Right now we’ve just launched a blue heart campaign to highlight the benefits of clean air,” says Lucy. The group already has 200+ members and “a big following on twitter, well over 600.” Recently there was a very positive piece in the Islington Tribune.
She’s also excited to work with a new team at the council following appointment of Cllr Rowena Champion as Environment chief. “All the campaigning we were doing before felt like we were hitting a brick wall. Now we’ve got open dialogue, or some way forward with a constructive conversation – within the constrictions of what can be done despite the lack of money.”
Lucy Facer: “In Islington you feel like you are on the doorstep of everything. But one issue I have is the air pollution. If it wasn’t for that, it’d be perfect. It’s interesting during the lock down how the reduced air pollution makes it a really great place to live. We need to know – how do we keep our children safe from coronavirus and also safe from air pollution?” (LF)
Why Islington?
Lucy jokes that she is “In Islington by mistake,” but it’s clear she is passionate about the place. The actual story involves an auction, a misunderstanding and a new home… “I’d moved to Old Street with my husband. One Saturday I was looking at some auction properties on line and thought we’d take a look at one in Myddleton Square. We both arrived separately, saw each other and had the same thought, this place is amazing. We had two days before the auction, we’d fallen in love with it but knew we hadn’t done enough research – but we went along to the auction anyway, just to see. Just as we left I grabbed my cheque book, just in case. I had to leave early and go back for work, so I said to my husband ‘If it goes for a reasonable amount go for it. But my husband heard something a little bit different. My husband kept bidding – the top price came up that we thought we could pay, and the hammer came down on his bid. His stomach fell through to the floor. He phoned me at work. ‘We’ve won the property,’ he said. I didn’t believe him until he explained he’d been taken to the auctioneer’s room and was surrounded by people giving him concerned looks…”
“We absolutely loved living there and only reluctantly left, because the flat felt too small when we had a second child. We had lovely neighbours, the church bells, horses clip clopping through it. I gave birth to my daughter in that flat. It’s brilliant. The restaurants, the vibe of the place, the art, the interiors. And there was lots of filming there – the suffragette film, and Tracy Ulman did a brilliant four-part series. When they were filming Howard’s End my son was 2-weeks-old so I watched them filming outside our house and then watched the series in awe.”
The thing about Islington is the culture, the vibe and the mix of people. It’s quite artsy, there’s lots going on, it’s residential and close to London so you feel like you are on the doorstep of everything. So much diversity to it. But one issue I have is the air pollution. If it wasn’t for that, it’d be perfect. It’s interesting during the lock down how the reduced air pollution makes it a really great place to live. We need to know how do we keep our children safe from coronavirus, and also safe from air pollution?”
What’s wrong with Islington’s air quality?
“The top 3 illnesses from air pollution are lung conditions, heart disease and strokes and those are the underlying problems that people who are dying from coronavirus have.
Air pollution is weakening our defences, people living in areas of high pollution are more vulnerable to the virus. That’s why it is really important that we do clean up our act and do make a change. People keep saying the air smells amazing and look at the birds in our back garden. We’ve had a robin and a finch in our garden for the first time. You can smell the trees, the grass, nature. And yet we are all very aware that this massive pandemic is going on. Even so I feel more relaxed and happier to let my children walk along the road, because normally I’m stressed because they’re being exposed to so much pollution.”
Lucy Facer has fond memories of living in Myddelton Square, N1. (c) Islington Faces
Places & people Lucy Facer loves in Islington
- Highbury fields – because it’s the biggest open green space, and I love the variety – the playground, the ice cream van, the tennis courts, and safe open spaces to run. It’s got something for everybody.
- Our local pub – the Duchess of Kent. Family friendly so we can take the kids there. And it does a very good gin and tonic.
- Myddleton Square because it has beautiful Georgian architecture. Quiet, peaceful and a safe haven for kids to play.
- I like Cllr Caroline Russell from Highbury East coming to our meetings as she’s been working in this space for many years and is a fabulously positive person.
Lucy Facer is co-founder of Islington Clean Air Parents. The group has recently launched a blue hearts for clean air campaign.
Play street memories
“Last September I organised a play street on Liverpool Road, near Highbury Corner, after getting permission from the council to close the road for half a day (4 hours) – section near Highbury. Car free days are really becoming a thing when people realise what roads can be like when not dominated by cars. I do drive a car (I have an electric car) but I always thought cars had the right of way, but now I think people should have the right of way, and people should be given priority. That way people would be safer to exercise, walk and be on the roads. Traffic dominates but when you have a car free day or a play street, communities come out and talk to people they have never spoken before – two of our neighbours who had lived for 20 years in the same houses, just a few doors down from each other, and had children same age, but in all that time they’d never met. It took a play street for them to meet and they hit it off immediately. A busy road that is dominated by cars stops communities from building.
“We had an amazing time,” she says. “All the families out playing, and one of the neighbours bought out bacon butties for everyone. We had football pitches. It wasn’t just families also older couples, people passing by joined in. Families from local areas. Such a vibe and such a buzz. We even had a little parklet and put out fake grass with table and chairs.”
Last November the group held a clean air event at the town hall with Ian Mudway from Kings College, Rosamund Adoo Kissi Deborah who told how her daughter Ella died from asthma, and would be alive today if it were not for air pollution, Claire McDonald from Mums for Lungs, David Smith from Little Ninja, who runs an anti-idling campaign in Wandsworth and respiratory doctor Aarash Saleh from Drs Against Diesel. “We had an amazing panel of speakers and so illuminating. One of the key things Ian Mudway said was a lot of damage done by air pollution is sub-clinical, we don’t realise the effect when it’s happening. It’s only later on in life when we realise the effect – heart attack, stroke, lung size will be up to 5-10% smaller than children growing up in clean air. That’s a physical fact. Children going to schools in polluted areas suffer impaired learning and are up to one year of learning behind because they’re not able to concentrate so well,” says Lucy.
“I’d already started the clean air thing before my son Otis was diagnosed with wheeze, which is the precursor to asthma. Now I feel our biggest focus is air pollution in schools. My daughter goes to a school near Pentonville Road where pollution is off the scale. I’d wanted them to put in air filters in the classroom, but at first the Head wasn’t keen. It wasn’t a priority. People are not aware how serious it is, because air pollution is so invisible and there are always more pressing matters. Eventually she put air filters in and we were very pleased, but it took a lot of raising awareness to make that change happen. Then we thought schools across Islington need to be making changes in the classroom and on kids’ journey to school when they are most exposed to pollution.”
To help this happen, Lucy and the Islington Clean Air Parents approached Islington Council: “We want a schools clean air tool kit – so parents can go to their Head and prioritise which measures can be made to reduce air pollution. We are now getting that document organised and working with the council on this. I hope it will be ready this summer 2020. The key to this is empowering parents who are concerned about air pollution so that they can look at all the different options to reduce pollution; green walls, air filters, plants in classrooms, classroom lessons on air pollution, change travel to school, stop idling near the school at pick up times. There are so many things the schools can do.”
They are also working on an anti-idling campaign and the council agreed pre-Covid-19 pandemic that the group can put up anti-idling posters around hot spots such as parks and schools. They also hope to organise more play streets for clean air day in June. We’d like to help get more play streets happening across the borough for Car free day in September – it makes such a difference when you experience a street with pedestrian priority. You can start to imagine what the possibilities are.
The Covid-19 lockdown has given everyone in Islington the experience of what a less polluted borough is like – three cheers to Lucy Facer and groups like Islington Clean Air Parents for making sure our homes are less polluted.
- Islington clean air parents is busy on twitter, follow and retweet at air_parents and @lucyfacer
- You can also keep up to date by joining, and using
- www.islingtoncleanairparents.co.uk
- Any questions to islingtoncleanair@gmail.com
Over to you
If you’d like to nominate someone to be interviewed who grew up, lives or works in Islington, or suggest yourself, please let me know, via nicolabaird dot green at gmail dot com. If you enjoyed this post you might like to look at the A-Z index, or search by interviewee’s roles or Meet Islingtonians to find friends, neighbours and inspiration. Thanks for stopping by. Nicola
