It's 75 years since Parker Brothers, the Massachusetts-based games company, published Monopoly, the property speculation board game that has become one of the enduring staples of toy shops the world over. That first edition used the New Jersey resort of Atlantic City to supply its street names, as the US edition still does, but the game crossed the oceans almost immediately. The first foreign edition was the British game, with London streets, followed swiftly by versions in France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Italy and Austria, before it spread around the world. What White and I plan to do is roll our way round the board to discover how some of the areas of the London Monopoly board have changed in the intervening three-quarters of a century.

Why are many European carmakers now planning to build electric vehicles? Because many European cities are widely expected to ban high-emissions vehicles from their city cores over the next decade–perhaps even vehicles with any emissions at all.

Now, Paris may be the first city to experiment with such a policy. Next year, it will begin to test restrictions on vehicles that emit more than a certain amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilometer–the measure of a car's contribution to greenhouse gases.

An official within the Parisian mayor's office, Denis Baupin, identified older diesel-engined cars and sport-utility vehicles as specific targets of the emissions limit.