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Street life 2017

An array of daytime recordings made along street markets and other gathering-places which are pedestrianised by official design or unofficial habit. Playback of each recording is synced to a simple animation plotting the route taken.

Brixton Station Road and Electric Avenue 5:10

Map image extract © OpenStreetMap contributors, reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Time, date and weather: 1.20 pm, Saturday 16th September 2017. Mostly overcast with scattered showers; 15°C, wind 8 mph.

Description: Starting at the west end of Brixton Station Road by the junction with Brixton Road. Traffic on Brixton Road; voices of passersby; the noise of a generator; loud recorded music from successive stalls; a dog barks; a train passes along the viaduct immediately to the south; a power tool in the middle distance; a reverberant tone to voices and other sounds in Pope's Road; more trains pass overhead; sizzle of food being cooked outside; traffic on Atlantic Road; a hubbub of voices on Electric Avenue; a man raises a sales cry outside a butcher's shop; recorded music from stalls and shops; airplane drone; rustle of carrier bags; a light rain shower begins around three-quarters of the way along Electric Avenue.

Comments: While the arcades in Brixton have changed greatly with the arrival en masse of coffee shops and small restaurants, the markets along Electric Avenue and Brixton Station Road seem to have stayed much the same as they were a decade ago. Occasionally street preachers hold forth at the junction of Electric Avenue and Electric Lane but there weren't any around at the time of recording.