Life viewed from London E3
Knitting The Air (4-20 September 2026)
Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ
The latest exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery is a striking display of data, visualising something you can't see but might kill you. It's a calendar of knitted squares representing a year of air quality in east London, hardly the Bayeux Tapestry but an important historical record all the same.
It covers three walls of the gallery, almost like it was designed to be exhibited here, and was knitted by a team of 132 volunteers over a two year period. It's amazing what you can get a community group to do if you inspire them.
The top two rows represent data taken from a sensor by the A12 in Poplar and the bottom two data from a nearby street outside Culloden Primary School. The pinks are the PM2.5 count while the blues underneath represent nitrogen dioxide. In each case there are three shades, the lightest for 'below WHO guidelines', the darkest for 'over UK legal target' and the medium for the fuzzy zone inbetween. The panel below shows that NO₂ exceeded legal levels on 1st, 6th, 7th, 8th and 16th September 2023 (coinciding with a particular hot spell) and only properly fell below WHO guidelines on 18th September (a cooler day with high winds).
n.b. ULEZ expanded to cover all of London a couple of days before September 2023 started, but this won't have had much impact here because Poplar was well inside the previous zone.
What you want to see if you live round here is a lot of light pink and a lot of light blue, and whilst maybe half the pink stripes are indeed good, light blue stripes are worryingly thin on the ground. I do indeed live around here so it's chastening to be presented with a knitted record of how much air pollution my lungs are inhaling. The Aberfeldy estate has it particularly bad, being cut off by urban dual carriageways on two sides, and maybe that's why so many people were willing to give up their time to contribute to this project.
Fran: I've lived here along the A12 for forty years, and I've just noticed the air getting worse and worse. I was on inhalers for a long time for asthma.
Gul: I'd heard of air quality but I didn't pay it much attention until I started knitting and then understood what the lines and colours meant.
Sadia: The knitting was therapeutic in itself, but the community around knitting and what the project created, I think I enjoyed that the most.
Freddie: As an educational tool it's been amazing. I was at an event at a GP surgery on the Aberfeldy Estate and there was a small display of knitting panels there and some kids from the local school came in and the questions they were asking were just amazing.
As well as the knitted panels (and explanatory detail out back), associated events include a photographic walk this afternoon, a curator's tour on Saturday and the chance to knit your own panels next Thursday. But the exhibition's only open until 20th September so you don't have long to get here (head to Bus Stop M, you can't miss it). In good news the London Transport Museum has agreed to take the artwork afterwards, rather than it clogging up the organiser's house, but given its size I expect it'll end up in storage rather than on occasional display. I hope the Mayor finds time to pop in before it goes and perhaps takes the opportunity for a photoshoot, the three walls of the gallery making clear the invisible fight he's made a cornerstone of his administration, and which those of us who live round here face daily.
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