Acrid smoke in Norwich
We live in central Norwich in a row of terraced houses. Over recent years, a few neighbours have installed wood burners and now, in Autumn, Winter and early Spring, both our back and front gardens are filled with thick, acrid smoke that makes your eyes sting and your throat sore.
This smoke also enters the house, even through closed windows and defunct chimneys, and when leaving the house, you often have to walk the entire length of the street before managing to escape the smoke.
The same thing happens during the summer with neighbours using BBQs and also burning chemically treated pallets in chimeneas, and yet Norwich City Council does nothing about it, even when complaints are made.
Norwich still has only two smoke control zones which were set up sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. The city is frequently second only to London in terms of air pollution, yet has no heavy industry.
The city and county councils make much of their attempts to cut pollution caused by cars and buses, but no effort whatsoever to deal with PM2.5 particulate pollution caused by wood burning.
As a result, Norwich is becoming a really unpleasant place to live, and woodburning must be adversely affecting the health of the urban population, many of whom live in tightly-knit rows of small Victorian and Georgian terraced houses.