HISTORICAL SOUNDS | LONDON STREETS 1909
A collection of descriptions and references to sounds drawn mainly from primary sources such as autobiographies, diaries and statutes, as well as novels written around the times they depict.
| Sub-category | 1st to 10th |
11th to 15th |
16th to 17th |
18th | Early 19th |
Late 19th |
Early 20th |
Late 20th |
| Beggars, hustlers and scavengers | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |||
| Street entertainers | 1 | |||||||
| Costermongers and street traders | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||
| Transport for hire | 1 | |||||||
| Quack doctors | 1 | |||||||
| Recruitment of workers | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| Work songs and music | 1 | |||||||
| Workplace cries and audible signals | 1 | 1 |
Period referred to: 1880s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Nether World
Type of publication: Novel
Author: George Gissing
Year of publication: 1889
Page/volume number: Chapter XI
The quiet of a summer morning in London
Occasionally her eyes wandered, and once they rested upon her grandfather's face for several minutes. But for the cry of a milkman or a paper-boy in the street, no sound broke the quietness of the summer morning. The blessed sunshine, so rarely shed from a London sky—sunshine, the source of all solace to mind and body—reigned gloriously in heaven and on earth.
Period referred to: 1950s
Sound category: Social > Local celebrations
Title of work: Manchester Guardian
Type of publication: Newspaper
Author: George Gale
Year of publication: 1952
Page/volume number: 6 July 1952
The last tram from Woolwich to New Cross, 1952
The journey from Woolwich to New Cross of the last tram was incomparable.
Imagine a crowd along a prescribed route to see a king or queen pass by. Let it keep its squealing children about its knees and hoist up its infants with flags in their hands. Give it torn paper hats, flamboyant holiday-camp hats and ribbons, football rattles, tin trumpets, dustbin drums and scrubbing-board drums, real and tin tray cymbals, piano-accordions, and a welter of whistles. Let in line up not in daylight but late at night, after all the public-houses from the Old Kent Road to the free ferry at Woolwich and beyond to Abbey Wood have sent away their tens of thousands of customers filled with beer, their arms and pockets filled with bottles, and their throats in full voice. Take away most of the policemen a stately procession would command and then, at midnight, with the moon almost full and the night air hot, send out, to run this crazy gauntlet, a tram.
Off it moved, filled with a noisy babble of passengers, and escorted by policemen on motor-cycles, hundreds of cyclists, scores of motor-cyclists, and dozens of cars. There was a great cheer, flares were lit, horns and whistles blown. A woman leaped on to the rear of the tram and clung there, her frock, underclothes, and blasphemies streaming out behind her. She fell off soon, but others clambered on the sides. By the end of the journey there were twenty youths sitting on the roof and dozens strung along the sides. There was singing all the way, and the tunes came easily to mind. 'Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner', 'Any Old Iron', and so on to 'Auld Lang Syne'.
Period referred to: 1950s
Sound category: Economic > Beggars, hustlers and scavengers
Title of work: The Lonely Londoners
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Sam Selvon
Year of publication: 1956
Page/volume number: pp61-62, Penguin Modern Classics edition
A Caribbean writer describes elderly Londoners singing for money in the streets
The old fellars do that too, and sometimes they walk up a street in a plush area with their cap in their hand, and sing in a high falsetto, looking up at the high windows, where the high and mighty living, and now and then a window would open and somebody would throw down threepence or a tanner, and the old fellar have to watch it good else it roll in the road and get lost. Up in that fully furnished flat where the window open (rent bout ten or fifteen guineas, Lord) it must be have some woman that sleep late after a night at the Savoy or Dorchester, and she was laying under the warm quilt on the Simmons mattress, and she hear the test singing. No song or rhythm, just a sort of musical noise so nobody could say that he begging.
[. . .]
Or else, the old fellars go by the people that queueing up for the cinema. Not so much by the one and sixes and two and nines, but by the three and twos and four shillings. And some of them old fellars so brazen that though it against the law to beg they passing the old cap around, and if they see a policeman they begin to sing or play a old mouthorgan.