I can tell from experience there is a big difference in the air. In that area it smelled like exhaust and smog, while the center had no such thing.
When I reflect on it, I feel that the less affluent areas have been left out to dry / rot in the exhaust. While the upper class city center is now pristine.
The outer zones of the city are definitely dirtier, but it has less to do with ULEZ and more to do with practical travel times. Despite great public transport, getting between the spokes of the wheel is still a challenge, so people who don’t work in the city centre often drive. The further out you go, the more people like that there are.
While there are small upper-class enclaves in the city center, the most affluent areas of London are the outer boroughs. You can this reflected in electoral maps as well, where the center is mostly Labour, while the outer boroughs have typically voted more rightwing.
ULEZ has expanded outward step by step, but the strongest resistance to further expansion has come from the more affluent areas further out.
Outer and anti-ULEZ right-wing areas - Bexley, Romford, Welling, Uxbridge - might be more affluent than deprived inner-city parts, but they're a lot less affluent (as well as far less educated) than the professional-class areas of the inner city, which these days seems to span all the way from Muswell Hill down to Tooting.
Tory/rightwing votes used to be a thing for rich people who wanted to keep their winnings for themselves, pay less tax and/or encourage the less successful to work harder and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The modern tory party seems to be mostly for losers, racists and grumpy pensioners who want to blame all their problems on immigrants, LGBTQ+ and "the woke".
And the biggest disbenefit is to people who identify as poor or hard-up but are in reality somewhere near or a bit above average (mostly down to whether or not they own their home outright) - and are much more likely to be white.
So it's pretty obvious how this lines up with UKIP/Reform, the whole "deserving vs undeserving" poor narrative, and why the people smashing up the cameras look a lot like football hooligans.
Low income vote Tory and Farage
Is this why housing is more expensive in central London?
Put another way: Where I live in Outer London, most housing apart from a handful of conversions and some council blocks until recently started at 3-bedroom houses with gardens. There are now a few large blocks targeting renters that include smaller flats by the station, but they're all marketed as luxury flats.
A walk further out and the 5+ bedroom houses and mansions lining private sports grounds and expensive private schools start. A little bit further you get the private roads leading to private mansions alongside private primary schools.
Centuries in fact.
The prevailing wind is from the west so the worst air has always been found in the east.