Kensington and Chelsea joins Air Aware
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has joined Air Aware, the public air-quality assistant OpenKit built with London boroughs. Here is what changed.
Ibrahim Mizi
· 3 min read
Air Aware is the free public air-quality assistant we built with London boroughs: real-time readings from the boroughs’ own monitoring networks, explained in ordinary language, with no sign-up and nothing to install. It launched with Hackney, the City of London, Tower Hamlets and Newham, and residents stay with it for an average of five minutes and two seconds a session.
In 2026 the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea became the fifth borough on the service. The council’s own air quality monitoring pages now direct residents to Air Aware for the borough’s real-time data.
What Kensington and Chelsea residents get
The borough runs one of the denser monitoring networks in London. Its published monitoring programme covers more than a hundred locations: five permanent continuous monitoring stations from North Kensington to Earl’s Court, around eighty passive diffusion tubes, and a set of mobile sensors that includes part of the Breathe London network.
Air Aware takes those readings and makes them usable. A resident can select the borough on the live map, see the boundary and its sensors, read PM2.5 and NO2 levels against the DEFRA guideline, and ask in plain language what a reading means for them: for a school run, for a running route, for someone with asthma. The answer comes from the boroughs’ published data and public-health guidance, and the assistant does not go out to the open web for anything.
Why this matters beyond air quality
Air Aware was designed with residents across eight workshops before it shipped, and it grew because the pattern holds: public data that already exists, made legible to the people it is about, inside a boundary the councils control. A new borough joining does not need a new build. The service takes the borough’s feeds, its communications team gets its own workspace, and residents get the same assistant with their own area’s data.
The full Air Aware case study covers how the service was designed and what the boroughs measure. If your organisation sits on public data that residents or customers cannot yet use, that is the kind of workflow our audit exists to find.
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