Welcome to London – the most toxic town on the planet

Oxford Street's more polluted than Beijing and the sky's alive with cranes. Just what kind of city is Boris Johnson creating?

Illustration by Belle Mellor

Emissions research from King's College London has found nitrogen dioxide concentrations on Oxford Street to be worse than they are anywhere else on Earth, in the history of air pollution. David Carslaw, who led the research, said: "To my knowledge this is the highest in the world in terms of both hourly and annual mean." That's higher than Beijing and Dhaka, higher than anywhere where face masks are the norm and the streets seem to throng with lost medics, and more than 11 times the EU limit.