If sustainability is important to you on your trip to London – and it is an increasingly common consideration – the first step must be finding a good rental company that offers electric car hire London. That, too, is increasingly possible. The Mayor of London has an aim: to make his city zero-carbon by 2030, and with electric car hire you are playing your part.
This is not something that can happen overnight, but the will is there on the part of the authorities and the population of the UK has largely come around to the idea that electric vehicles are the way forward.
To this end, the government has introduced incentives for private individual and businesses, with vehicle taxes reduced or even waived completely
One of the main areas to be dealt with is the availability of charging points, and London continues to work on that, with more points being installed in convenient places all the time, making it possible to visit beauty spots like Primrose Hill in the north and Telegraph Hill in the south.
If we expand the ecological view to where to go and what to do, again numbers are growing.
Walking tours are very popular and come with various themes as organisers vie to attract customers. But whether it is public buildings or places where Jack the Ripper terrorised the locals, you are sure to find something of interest.
Carbon neutral businesses including restaurants and now growing at a rate we saw only a few years ago with vegetarian and vegan options. They may still be in the minority, but things are changing and you can find an eco-friendly restaurant quite easily now.
Jikoni in Marylebone was a trailblazer in this respect, being the first independent restaurant in the UK to go carbon-neutral. Now restaurants such as Spring in Covent Garden and Silo in Hackney have followed suit, and it only takes a few brave souls among a country’s entrepreneurs to show it can be done, before more businesspeople take the plunge, and eventually it becomes perfectly ordinary and even standard procedure.
Meanwhile, as the built environment strives to clean up its act, the focus falls on the great outdoors, and London is blessed with a great many parks and public spaces where the visitor can spend time, electric car parked safely while the driver and passengers enjoy some clean, fresh city air.
It wasn’t so long ago that London was choking on smog as coal fires belched their foul gases to mix with the fog caused by the weather and the majestic river Thames. The novels of Charles Dickens give us a good picture of life in those times, but it was the Great Smog of 1952 that finally woke London up to the problem. The city was even known as The Smoke, but when the people of the capital put their minds to it, the problem was solved quite quickly.
More recently, many cities around the world tackled the problem of pollution in rivers, and London was very successful in that.
Both of these major changes show how what was once ingrained behaviour can be changed, and as the visitor enjoys the wonderful environment of Hyde Park, Hampstead Heath or Battersea Park, plus boat trips up the Thames and city-viewing from on high with the London Eye, eco-friendly adventures are here to stay.
