Londonist likes to breathe. This Londonist is pneumatically challenged, and so she is especially fond of a good puff of the invisible stuff. So when the invisible stuff becomes visible, and London is shrouded in an ominous sulphurous blanket, we either stay indoors, or wander around looking like Darth Vader, with one of those terribly fetching mouth and nose masks that cyclists wear. Various bods are meant to monitor air quality, but it seems to us that their technical bits are often out of order. Any asthmatic worth their Ventolin can tell you just how bad the air is simply by stepping outside their front door of a morning. Jeez, the air in London is deemed by some to be more harmful than the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. Mr. Mayor, bless his fair-traded cotton socks, is trying to help, with his recent edicts on low emissions. But we’ve a way to go before we can all start breathing easy.
So it is with great glee that we read today of those clever people at walkit.com’s new on-line toy. Thanks to them you can now go walkies without breathing in anything particulately noxious or noisome. They have put a mapping device on their website to help you plot the least polluted route from A for Aldgate to B for Bromley. It has kept us quiet for hours in the Londonist office today…but then we are map geeks. We can report that the rather more scenic and less toxic journeys that they sketched out for us were mostly a mere 10 minutes more than the more logical march along main roads. And it’s a jolly good way to discover some of the less obvious joys of our fair capital.
Have a pure, fragrant, balmy evening.
Parkland Walk piccie courtesy of markhillary’s flickr stream. Have any of you ever done this walk? It’s along an old railway near Ally Pally and it looks really exciting. It’s gone on Londonist’s list of must-do-this-Spring.
