THE LONDON SOUND SURVEY BLOG | COMMENTS
Occasional posts on subjects like field recording, London sounds past and present, other websites worth looking at, articles in the press, and news of sound-related events.
How Islington sounded in the 1950s
Posted by IMR on 17 September 2009
WANT TO KNOW how London sounded forty or fifty years ago? Go and ask someone who remembers. Here, my old friend Martin speaks in his own entertaining style about the sounds of Islington from the 1950s and 1960s, where he grew up in a tenement near the Angel.
Among other things, he recalls a quack doctor in Chapel market, accordion players, the sounds of fights from a rough pub called the Scotch House, kids’ street games, travelling knife grinders and lots more. It’s about ten minutes long, edited down from a half hour interview:
Excellent post. Martin’s a great storyteller - really brings that period alive. When you hear about conditions as they were post-war, you can really understand places like the Heygate Estate and the mentality that went into building them.
Posted by Tim on 24 September 2009
Curiously, the knife sharpeners still exist here in New York. They have little vans painted in black. You mainly see them in wealthier neighborhoods like the Upper West Side. I don’t think they cry out though - I’ve never heard one anyway.
Posted by Tim on 24 September 2009
Tim: I read somewhere most New York knife grinders are descended from people from a single town in Italy. It’s a similar story here in London, with most of the city’s 50-odd knife grinders having roots in the same valley in the Dolomites. Here’s a 2002 Daily Telegraph interview with a grinder.
Years ago I was introduced by a friend to one of the grinders who’d parked his van in Pimlico and was doing the rounds of the restaurants, his main customers. He’d had an interesting life, once working as an interpreter for de Gaulle. He drove a Morris J-Type commercial van.
He was known to collectors of the J-Type, which was how I got to meet him. The grinding wheel was mounted inside the van, and he’d keep the rear doors open while at work, the sparks flying out into the street. The van’s high roof let him work standing up.
For a time he had this slogan painted on the sides:
They seek him here, they seek him there
London’s knife grinder extraordinaire
Posted by IMR on 26 September 2009
Very interesting recording,brought back memories of my childhood in islington late 1940s and 1950s.As a boy I would go around the streets of islington selling parafin and my cry was “pink parafin,you stink,it’s lovely.
Oh happy day’s.
Posted by bob on 14 October 2009
Hello Bob, thanks for dropping by. Talking about smelly paraffin, Pink Paraffin must have had that in mind when they named their elephant mascot ‘Pongo’.
Posted by IMR on 14 October 2009
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