Just eight days into 2016 a busy London high street has taken the title of first to exceed annual legal limits of harmful gas emissions.

Putney High Street breached the European-wide legal ceiling on concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (N02) this morning for the nineteenth time since January 1.

This comes just three days before vans, lorries, and HGVs are to be banned from the high street in an effort to reduce traffic that brings the area to a standstill.

November 23: Vans to be banned on Putney High Street from January in bid to improve air quality

Simon Birkett, founder and director of the campaign group Clean Air in London, said: "This is because of the unbelievable high levels of diesel fumes in London.

"Many roads in London have the highest levels in the world.

"There’s only one solution and that is to ban diesel in the most polluted areas."

Under EU law, residents and pedestrians should be exposed to no more than 18 times a year of levels higher than 200 micrograms of N02 per cubic metre over the course of an hour.

Putney has nine bus routes passing through its main road so is susceptible to high levels of N02 with a hill behind that can trap fumes.

Mr Birkett said: "It is breathtaking that toxic air pollution in London is breaching the legal limit for a whole year within a few days.

"This shocking start to the 60th anniversary year of the world’s first Clean Air Act in 1956 illustrates the scale of Boris’ failure to reduce diesel fumes, which are the main street-level source of NO2, and protect hundreds of thousands of people on our busiest shopping streets.

"With Boris already irrelevant, Clean Air in London demands ‘bankable’ promises from all the Mayoral candidates to ban carcinogenic diesel exhaust from the most polluted places by 2020, as we banned coal burning so successfully 60 years ago, with an intermediate step by 2018."

There is no safe level of exposure to concentration of N02 above 200 micrograms, according to the World Health Organisation Other streets in London look dangerously close to passing the annual limit in the next few days, including Knightsbridge and Brixton Road.

Jenny Bates, Friends of the Earth, said: "Yet again, it is outrageous that Londoners are still choking on illegal levels of air pollution.

"The Mayor, as well as mayoral candidates, must commit to cleaning up our air by 2020 at the latest, rather than allowing the capital to suffer a further 5 years till 2025, as current government plans would have it.

"How many years does this have to happen before something is done?

"This is quite literally a life and death matter."

Monitoring equipment on Oxford Street, which breached the N02 limit in just two days last year, broke down on January 3 after recording three hours above 200 micrograms per cubic metre so it could have been the first again this year.

Environment spokesman Councillor Jonathan Cook said: "We are working hard to improve air quality in Putney High Street.

"Our campaign has already delivered significant improvements with the introduction of dozens of modern cleaner engine buses serving routes along the high street.

"This new initiative is designed to remove the hold-ups and obstructions caused by delivery trucks and freeing up traffic to flow more easily and efficiently should reduce vehicle emissions and help to further raise local air quality standards.

"As well as reducing vehicle emissions this measure will have the added benefit of improving journey times for other road users, particularly the local buses that often get delayed because of parked vans and lorries in the high street."

Speaking to the Evening Standard, a ClientEarth environmental lawyer Alan Andrews said: "We first took the Government to court on this issue in 2011 but we can still see legal limits being broke in the first few days of January.

"Five years on the Government has still not got a handle on this problem and thousands of people a year are dying in London alone.

"In the coming months, we will take the Government back to court.

"In the meantime we need to hear from all mayoral candidates about how they are going to solve this public health crisis.

"Warm words and empty rhetoric will not save lives."