‘Snowdon Collection’ Trimphone – still with pulse dialling!

You’ve probably heard that the old copper phone lines will soon be switched off for good, after over a century of service. Since December 2023, you haven’t been able to buy a new land-line service from any company, the so-called “Stop Sell” date.

The exact switch-off dates have been moving around between the end of next year and January 2027, with variability in what Openreach (the wholesale supplier), and BT, Plusnet, Virgin Media etc (the retailers) say, which confuses the situation, but early 2027 appears the latest possible date. Beware that if you upgrade your broadband to “fibre” now,  or terminate your phone service rather than switching to another provider, you’re on the slippery slope to no conventional land-line, you cannot get it back once lost – possibly including your number – at any price.

Here we look at what the options and opportunities are, and note how surprisingly environmentally unfriendly and limited the default BT offer turns out to be, when compared with other options, and especially when compared with existing and in terms of environmental impact, the old tech. Google has similarly discovered that its new AI tech caused a 40% rise in power consumption last year, with AI reckoned to be 100 to 1000 times as energy intensive as traditional server activities, but here the percentage increase can dwarf even that, recalling that the IT industry is currently as responsible for as many global CO₂ emissions as air travel.

The change is happening globally – the US date was 2022, Canada 2023, and European countries have set various dates from 2021 to 2030.  The Luddites amongst us will be forced to act shortly, in one way or another, and if “full fibre” needs to be installed, the front of your building will very likely need a new hole drilled in it, hence our interest.

Here’s what Ofcom say. What they don’t appear to say is that there are independent services, a range of magic boxes, and even virtual solutions to convert your land-line number to the new tech, so that if it’s of value, you can keep it, without physical upheaval, and even use it on a mobile, independently of your existing supplier or broadband contract – read on.

The lack of a land-line won’t worry many, with unlimited calls now the norm for mobile contracts, and the most frequent users of land-lines now possibly nuisance callers, but it may be of concern if :

• You only have a land-line and no broadband internet connection.
• You have a burglar alarm with a monitoring service (auto dialler etc).
• You have a telecare service (falls detector etc).
• You run a business with a number that people know, which is also doubtless widely published.
• You want a full-featured desk phone, or the reliability and convenience of multiple phones around the home, rather than using your mobile.

Askew in Bloom – Award nomination 2023

Jane Mercer Award Winner Olena O’Leary (Askew in Bloom)

Robert Iggulden discusses proposals for increased engagement with our affiliates

Vice Chairman describes Nominations

Chairman’s address – Royal Masonic Hospital

Members at the 2023 AGM

Andy Slaughter MP with Nina Jindal – treasurer

Andy Slaughter MP discusses electoral boundary changes at the 2023 AGM

Olena O’Leary of ‘Askew in Bloom’ celebrates her Ukrainian heritage

AGM 2023

Committee member Annabel Clarke with Elizabeth Ryland at the 2023 AGM

Committee member Annabel Clarke with members and former committee member Julian Hillman

Chairman presents a token ‘Grenfell Crimp’ to a slightly bemused Andy Slaughter MP

Hoxton hotel – Environment Award winner 2023

The team behind the Hoxton Hotel – winner of the 2023 Environment Award

Askew in Bloom – Award nomination 2023

Andy Slaughter MP with ‘Askew in Bloom’ winners of the Jane Mercer Award 2023

(AGM Photos: Franco Chen. Click for full-size versions)

Summary

After a rapid run though the mandatory AGM procedures, approving the 2022 minutes, 2023 accounts, and committee re-elections, our guest speaker needed no introduction. As our local MP, with Twitter handle @Hammersmithandy, he has over 40 years experience as local councillor, deputy then leader in 1996, and an MP since 2005.  He talked about the various battles over the West Ken. estates that were originally given over to CAPCO for redevelopment as part of Earls Court, then reclaimed, the continuing issues with Charing Cross Hospital, the Bridge, flooding, and then onto large developments and the general pace of redevelopment, with a particular discussion on Shepherds Bush Market. He also mentioned that with the recently confirmed electoral boundary changes, his constituency is, not for the first time, being radically reshaped to lose the northern half to Ealing, while he could gain Chiswick in the new ‘Hammersmith & Chiswick’ constituency should he be elected next time.  He subsequently answered a number of questions from the audience including a topical one about Thames Water.

This year the main Environment Award was given to The Hoxton on Shepherds Bush Green. An addition to its own merits discussed in detail in the narrative, the building achieves the unusual feat of making a slightly awkward red brick building adjacent – Lawn House – fit better into the streetscape, so that the whole of ‘The Lawn‘ can be seen as a piece, perhaps the most characterful stretch of buildings in the borough, having won 2 further awards from us: the Dorsett (2015), and the Palladium (2022).

We again presented the Jane Mercer Award for “proactive co-operation, collaboration and communication” to a community gardening project – this time Askew in Bloom . The group shares some of the same enthusiastic members as last year’s winner, the Green Project, but this project has been running independently since 2019. It brings daily joy to what used to be a fairly ordinary W12 thoroughfare, and they are now spreading the word to other parts of the borough, starting with Dalling Road. More power to their collective elbows – and fewer asphalt tree pits!

Breathe London solar-powered wireless AQ monitor – close up on a lamp post on C9. These are Clarity node S sensors

As an off-beat way to mark the half-century since that iconic song Can the CAN topped the charts in June 1973, LBHF has sponsored air quality monitors that were installed on roadsides near a number of primary schools, and on the C9 cycleway in the last six months. The short and long-term numbers show that air quality isn’t very poor as claimed, suggesting instead that the Clean Air Neighbourhoods policy should be canned, or rather better, renamed and prioritised towards the basket of the other proposed environmental improvements in an unfortunately misnamed policy. With London Climate Action week around the corner, this is especially true when the extra miles, economic and other downsides of the proposed LTN’s are considered.

The policy aims to improve the overall environment in H&F, and who can deny that’s a good idea? But the unnecessary LTN part of the policy is likely to make the air worse in the worst hot spots, and the PR fails the fact-check, which we explore further below.

Our interactive map of ‘BreatheLondon’ sensors coloured by sponsor, May 2023. Click for more detail

50 monitors in H&F were supplied by Breathe London, as part of a 430+ fleet across London supported by Imperial’s ERG (Environmental Research Group). When they produce data, which can be intermittent because they’re radio linked, they appear to give reasonably consistent results in line with the council’s ‘regulatory’ stations HF4 and HF5 at Shepherds Bush Green and the Broadway, plus a new one, HF7 by Frank Banfield Park, which are run professionally by Ricardo Environmental.  Those stations are rather more sophisticated and reliable, covering more pollutants than the NO₂ and PM2.5 measured by the new monitors, which are nevertheless of most interest. We’re told that the council is also supplementing these with a private network of sensors, details of which are unavailable, though this from 2021 turns up in searches. In this article, we set the scene for an ongoing citizen science project, building on a previous article

A good news story

Long Term AQ Trends 1970-2020
[ Chief Medical Officer’s 2022 Air pollution report ]

Contrary to many reports, since the H&F Air Quality commission first reported in 2016 (and the 2015 publication of the KCL report the council relies on), average nitrogen oxide levels in the borough have nearly halved, in line with the national figures shown adjacent. The decades-long steep straight-line downward trends previously described, suggests a proportionate and realistic plan is needed to address causes of the remaining local issues, rather than the imposition of unhelpful LTN’s.

PM2.5, though a quarter of the level it was in 1970, is still said by the WHO to be the main concern. While the council’s CAN page describes a good range of issues, it relies on short term pandemic-skewed data to shore up a fragile argument, ignoring long-term trends. If the graph adjacent represented rates of infant mortality, road accidents, heart attack, cancer rates or obesity, everyone would be singing from the rooftops, celebrating such a great success.

‘Clean Air’ vs. Roads

World Air Quality October 2022 – IQAir, including H&F and Breathe London data

LBHF Clean Air Neighbourhoods

We expect the council’s Clean Air Neighbourhoods policy to be a well-intentioned and researched policy, with its implications and unintended consequences carefully considered. There are good things in here, such as planting more street trees, improvements to street safety, and some incentives intended to discourage car use. However, on examination, few measures actually relate directly to ‘the name on the tin’ – air quality – and the one that does, only relates to around 12% of the air quality problem in Hammersmith according to Public Heath England’s figures below. This week’s smell of wood-burning stoves reminds us that the main problem here is PM2.5 particulates. Rather than deal with that, this policy would concentrate nitrogen oxide pollution where it’s highest – on main roads.

Welcome to the infamous Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) debate that dare not speak its name – our council knows how toxic that is. Instead it has decided to use a heavy-handed mix of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, deployed with highly inflammatory headline-grabbing phrases such as TOXIC, SILENT KILLER, DEATH, in a decades-old ‘big stick’ approach. The claim of 40,000 UK annual deaths is a misappropriation of the data, which actually relates to life expectancy. Privately the council still uses the term ‘LTN’, and funds them instead of schools, with Section 106 contributions.

Along with a proposed bridge toll, this binary “clean” vs. “dirty” social-media style campaign is beginning to make us look like Fortress Hammersmith, rather than the well-connected borough we appreciate, predicated on the idea that other boroughs wouldn’t think of putting up their barriers similarly… would they?  Hounslow’s so-called South Chiswick Liveable Neighbourhood  is one such controversial and euphemistically named control scheme already on our doorstep, which points to Hammersmith bridge closure as part of the problem.

The wider London picture: LTNs can increase, rather than decrease vehicle miles

Evidence from the controversial South Fulham Traffic, Congestion & Pollution Reduction (TCPR) scheme shows that the policy of diverting traffic can make it worse overall, particularly on main and boundary roads such as the A4, or to places not measured, out of sight and out of mind. This was confirmed recently by widely-reported DfT figures showing that total vehicle miles driven in the ten inner London boroughs that introduced LTNs or equivalent schemes in 2020 rose by an average 11.4% in 2021 vs. 8.9% where they hadn’t. This is one of the reasons the TCPR has had to be extended to the western side of Wandsworth Bridge Road, but the recent extension is already reported to be causing gridlock in Wandsworth itself and on Wandsworth Bridge and New Kings Roads.

Kings College and the council’s own data shows that our backstreets are already as much as 50% less polluted than main roads. Clean Air Neighbourhoods might therefore be seen as a divisive and discriminatory policy addressing the wrong target, by aiming to improve air quality in areas where it’s not a significant problem, and diverting traffic to main roads, where it would worsen the sometimes already sub-standard air quality, slowing the movement of public transport and other traffic, reinforcing last year’s similarly ill-conceived bus lane removals, and concentrating any pollution on those trying to “do the right thing” by using active travel modes – the bus, walking or cycling – or perhaps living alongside. The deeper dive at the foot of the article provides more detail. 

Daily congestion in King St (October 2022)

It’s not very useful claiming that H&F residents will be unaffected, as some councillors have, with oddly mixed messaging, potentially encouraging residents’ car use.  Let’s look past our own noses, and imagine other councils following suit and imposing their own set of rules, having had H&F traffic displaced to them.

Lock-down London would be divided up into a competing patchwork of complicated and differently administered fiefdoms, that no business or occasional visitor would want to, or in many cases be able to, cross – at least at any reasonable level of administration or cost – and Fortress London would become ever more a playground for the super-rich.

This represents a spectacular own goal from a council claiming to be “Doing things with residents, not to them”, and for whom it takes over 3700 words to explain just their South Fulham TCPR scheme (that’s 50% longer than this article, which is hardly short!). Unsurprisingly, the TCPR now has its own 7000-signature petition.

Going electric

In an era rapidly going electric (50% of new vehicles are projected to be electric in 3 years time), rather than the council’s retro big-stick approach, a far more effective policy would involve the carrot of improving public transport from it’s pitiful speeds by ungumming the main roads, and making it cheaper and more accessible, as they do in Germany. TfL has just done the exact opposite.

Instead, this policy would make it worse in the hotspots: the five most polluted spots measured in the 2022 air quality report are Hammersmith Road East/West (HF11/46), The Town Centre, Wood Lane (HF16), and of course the Broadway, all locations where traffic is already largely at a standstill. Amazingly, for a supposed ‘clean air’ policy there appear no exceptions for EV’s; this is actually an anti four-wheel policy – ‘clean air’ is a marketing ploy.

In the month of COP27, the council conflated air quality with climate change in order to ‘make it relevant’, and then casually targeted predetermined usual suspects, fitting a tired and over-politicised narrative. The two don’t always overlap, especially geographically as we wrote before, and sometimes even work in opposition, as described below.  But where the effects of climate change and air pollution do collide is in the ‘global south’ as the map above clearly illustrates, and, by encouraging pollution exports, this policy helps reinforce the situation. Do we want those countries, recently awarded ‘loss and damage’ payments from the developed world for climate change, to need to add loss and damage from our exported air pollution too?

Edward Woods Estate : solar panels on southern elevations

Our beady eye on planning applications has noted the seemingly innocuous application 2022/00504/CLP for removal of the arrays of a total of around 1000 solar panels across the southern elevations of the three tower blocks alongside the A3220, that form the Edward Woods Estate on the edge of the borough, but also ‘the largest building-integrated renewable energy array in London’.

The panels have recently been assessed as a high fire risk, and the plan is to remove them all, without replacement.  Just a few hundred metres from the Grenfell Tower, this is another aspect of the ongoing cladding scandal, with added spice.

We’re fans of renewable energy, (this website is 100% renewably powered by way of a miniscule example), and it was good news seeing such huge arrays installed here in Hammersmith just a decade ago, and now equally disappointing that the greenest borough, can’t find a way to economically replace or remediate them by reducing the risk to acceptable levels, especially in the current energy crisis, in visible support of a very public climate change strategy. We’d like to understand if there are any implications for other buildings with such PV panels, including small residential – read on…

The situation helps highlight more arcane yet significant structural problems in the energy market, which we expand on below, and which despite all the recent column inches on the subject, have not been talked about in mainstream media. Your reward for reaching the end of the article is an insight into why you’re still regularly paying the gas price for wind or solar power.

Edward Woods was ‘The largest building-integrated renewable energy array in London’, the solar part of the project costing around £1m a decade ago. To put it in context, this scale is equivalent to about two years of the entire borough’s Solar Together buying scheme applications (and rather more than actual installations), a scheme which is being promoted by the council at the moment.

Perhaps a significant lesson is staring us in the face?  As the climate change team say below, they’re focusing on other interventions instead, namely insulation and boiler replacements which are a more effective use of limited funds, especially on buildings taller than 18m with new post-Grenfell constraints. Take your cue, and look at this offer from the council to provide free Ecofurb Plans to help you identify what’s best to do in your particular circumstances, which can otherwise be a challenge to work out, as we mentioned before.

We approached Cllr. Wesley Harcourt, cabinet member for the Environment, for comment. The council’s climate change team responded with the statement in the blue box below.

We mentioned the government’s long-awaited Heat and buildings strategy in the article about Zero carbon homes a couple of months ago. Now published ahead of COP26, the direction of travel is a little clearer. Here we summarise what it says, looking at how it will affect you and your decisions as your existing heating system reaches end of life – we’re not looking at standards for newbuilds here – they have their own paths.  A third-party summary written by Building Design is a useful primer along with a cautionary reader comment from Finland highlighting the intricacies of vapour barriers when adding new insulation inside or out.  A recent Guardian article usefully lays out the “hydrogen landscape” and the ongoing tests.

Key points

The strategy says many good things, with good aspirations, but the thing that really stands out for existing homeowners is that a hydrogen infrastructure remains a work-in-progress. The issue is still: Can it be made economically and ecologically “at scale”, and deployed using existing gas mains? The government has said it needs more time to run research projects and decide – another 5 years. Can the climate wait ?

As we said previously, the heat-pump route is more involved, and has more finely tuned parameters for success.  You might therefore want to nurse that old boiler gently into its dotage until the infrastructure research is done, because a replacement hydrogen boiler (already designed with prototypes available from, for example, Worcester-Bosch, with a negligible cost premium) would be a trivial replacement by comparison, especially in a typical Hammersmith period home.  Installation of so-called hydrogen-ready boilers could be a way to prime the pump for a national switchover, like the switch from town gas from 1967 – 77.

If you’re interested in a no-nonsense discussion between a boiler manufacturer involved in government-sponsored hydrogen trials, their ins and outs, plus heat pumps, and someone who’s actually installed both in the real world, then the video adjacent is for you. It should open your eyes to most issues homeowners are about to grapple with, and discusses many of the points here in more detail.

Zero carbon homes are very much on-topic with the COP26 summit approaching in November, but to date rather more discussion has been around standards for newbuilds, downplaying the fact that by most measures 70-80% of the planned “net zero homes of 2050” are already built, 9-inch solid walls, warts and all.  “Decarbonising” them is now exercising government, councils, the RIBA and industry at many levels.

UK Domestic energy

You’ll probably have heard of plans to eliminate natural gas boilers by 2025 – certainly in newbuilds – but my house and yours won’t be so far behind.  Domestic energy use represents about 27% of UK energy consumption, with 85% of that apparently used for heating & hot water – as significant in climate effect as the usual suspects – cars and planes.

Brian’s home in Hammersmith

You may also be familiar with Tom Pakenham’s Passivhaus in Lena Gardens W6 from a few years ago, which sets a formidable standard for whole-house renovation with huge attention to detail to achieve the required standard.

But what if you took an existing Edwardian terraced family home in 2021, and made it zero carbon while living in it, but without gutting the interior, or adding 100+mm of hard insulation to the inside of all the external walls, ripping up the floors to insulate them, and possibly compromising or losing some of the period features we appreciate?  This is what our member Brian Thresh is doing – you may have seen him present the project at London Climate Action week in June.  He shows that it can be less intrusive than we might fear.

Let’s be honest for a moment, there are only so many builders in the world, and so many hours in the day, there is little practical chance of all the country’s millions of homes being laboriously superinsulated in the next few years – after all we’ve been talking about insulation for 40+ years already.  Brian expects to be able to demonstrate that his home is zero carbon, once the annual numbers roll in, through the combination of:

• Replacement of a gas boiler with a substantial 12kW air-source heat-pump
• 6.6kW of solar cells
• Battery storage
• A green & flexible electricity tariff, using a smartmeter

There’s an interesting tension here between expenditure on craftsmanship – a well designed and precisely executed complete refurbishment often with specialist materials – the Passivhaus – and the retrofit of a period home using modern mass-produced technology to achieve a similar net result, but with significantly less upheaval. 

It seems likely that the latter will prevail for the majority because of the numbers described above, with as much of the former as is practicable on the existing housing stock, but how do the finances and carbon footprint compare: Conversion / Running / Whole life?  Much of the public discussion is around carbon, and saving on everyday bills; rather less – a lot less – on Total Cost of Ownership, or Net Present Cost, important for those with shallower pockets. As Brian says, this stuff doesn’t come cheap at the moment.  It will be instructive to assess and compare over the years to come, particularly as technology improves, such that an optimised mix of solutions can be provided for each domestic setting.  Solar cells have already improved significantly, but you may not have owned any yet !

Quaker meeting entrance

Quaker meeting house frontage

2021 Environment Award – Quaker Meeting House

Quaker meeting plaque

Quaker meeting room 1

Quaker meeting room 2

Quaker meeting wooden ceiling

Quaker meeting outside and garden

(Click on images for full-sized versions, then scroll through the set)

Our member Victoria Timberlake has been instrumental on the New Meeting House Committee to get this project from inception to completion through many hurdles over a period of 17 years. We first reported on plans for the proposed development in our October Newsletter of 2014.

The previous post-war meeting house stood in a rather noisy location adjacent to the A4 and in the way of the new Town Hall development for which its site was required. The Council offered the new site as a swap, and we think this new use is an excellent fit for the area.

The new building brings a welcome break in the line of terrace houses on Bradmore Park Road, reminiscent of the open playground space that went before. Brackenbury is lucky to have this new neighbour, with its refreshing display of design enthusiasm enriching surface and form: the intriguing circular shape of the building, the gates, screens and brickwork on the street boundary. Careful design and quality of construction dress the functional needs of the interiors, and bring a quiet and serene air to the circular Meeting Room, full of light from the high clerestory windows and the views to the meadow garden behind, while maintaining privacy for the neighbours.

The space to the side and rear of the meeting house has been sown as a wild flower meadow, and will be spectacular next summer.  Alongside this greening, the building uses FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) sourced materials, and is designed to be environmentally efficient, with solar panels and CO₂ sensors for occupancy detection, adjusting air circulation in each space accordingly.  The low energy building database records it as AECB (Association for Environment Conscious Building) standard certified.

Heathrow Expansion was temporarily derailed by the Judicial Review (JR) in February, ruling the Airports National Policy (ANPS) illegal through its non-compliance with the existing UK Climate Change Act, and by extension, the Heathrow expansion plans that relied on it. By law, the Climate Change Act commits the UK government to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 100% of 1990 levels (net zero) by 2050.

Heathrow expansion 2019

There have been many setbacks to the Airport’s expansion plans over the years from Terminal 5 onwards: claims that several top politicians would stop expansion, elongated planning enquiries, and many anti-expansion campaigns, but like the addict it appears to be, suffering Compulsive Shopping Disorder, Heathrow Airport Limited (HAL) keeps coming back for just one more hit, claiming that it will then be satisfied.  Like it’s maniacal namesake in Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001 – a Space Odyssey, to accept this would be to seriously misjudge the machine.

HAL’s public response to the JR is “10,000 quality apprenticeships by 2030, New Routes and 180,000 new Jobs”, plus the inevitable appeal against the judgement.  While new routes could be created easily with a new runway, they could also be created by displacing cargo and short-haul flights onto greener options, such as rail or electric vehicles (remembering that Heathrow is actually the UK’s largest cargo destination, with 1.8 million tons in 2018: up 20%, matching passenger volume increases since T5 opened).  The other two claims stretch credibility beyond reason, given that Heathrow currently employs 76,000, the expansion would represent a more than doubling in size.  Or perhaps that gives a clue as to the full plan ? 

Heathrow doesn’t appear to be addressing the issues that most of us care about – the effect on the environment, surface transport, and the lives of residents in large parts of the South-East – all the more so having recently become used to not being woken at or before 6AM with fewer flights during the Coronavirus pandemic; Heathrow has temporarily reduced to single runway operation.   In the new Greta-inspired world, HAL makes additional claims regarding sustainability, but it again stretches reason that the discredited greenwash baked into last year’s consultation could have been warmed over sufficiently to pass muster this time round.

Committee and several members attended the recent Climate Change event at the Lyric to hear what the recently formed commission has been discussing, and to provide input.  Sian Alexander, the Director of the Lyric, opened the meeting making the following points:

• The H&F commission is a residents’ working group engaged in a ‘public facing campaign’.
• The Commission started in 2019 and is one of a number of a H&F Residents’ Commissions.
• The Commission is chaired of local architect Paul Beaty-Pownall, and consists of twelve local members.
• Its purpose is to advise and help H&F Council achieve zero carbon emissions by 2030.
• Its first formal meeting took place in December 2019.
• We all need to be prepared for major changes.

Fehinti Balogun

We were then presented with a personal story of the effects of climate change from actor Fehinti Balogun, making an informative and entertaining presentation. He touched on how climate change affects not only himself but his wider family here and abroad, highlighting that the issue is about eco, not ego. He’s been giving a similar presentation to schools in recent months.

He noted that the Commission is believed to only need 3.5% direct support from the population for success to be guaranteed by influencing all those connected.

Paul Beaty-Pownall

Paul Beaty-Pownall summed up and introduced the workshop sessions that followed. The audience were invited to participate and circulate through four separate discussion groups in order to gain ideas and recommendations from the participants.

We hope to see the report from the commission in the coming months to inform the Council’s progress in accelerating our local responses to Climate Change.

To visualise the extent of the problem, the UK’s current emissions of thousands of tonnes of CO₂ per hour caused by electricity generation can be seen here