In the mid-1980s my Grass Roots enterprise was growing and soon outstripped the office building we occupied. We worked cheek by jowl in a 19th Century building built by the Rothchild family. In my youthful exuberance I persuaded myself to invest in buying the Pendley Manor Estate.
My youngest offspring Matilda and I decided on a Saturday tour of some of London’s great features. We would start with the Natural History Museum. She had grown up in a country environment. This trip was to prove to be a damascene moment.
As a kid I delivered newspapers and worked on markets. It was what kids from docklands did but in my case in the smogs of London. A piece of legislation in 1956 was an attempt to do good and clean up our air. It was a start, but the work never finishes, and the law of unintended consequences seems always to apply.