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 |
| General sounds of street and town | 7 | 2 | 10 | 4 | 1 | |||
| Open-air markets | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||
| Road traffic | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||
| Communal living and confinement | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||||
| River traffic and related sounds | 5 | 1 | 1 | |||||
| Plague, war and disaster | 1 | 6 | 1 | 3 | ||||
| Sound qualities of buildings | 1 | |||||||
| Sounds of crowds | 1 |
Period referred to: 1980s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Brick Lane
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Monica Ali
Year of publication: 2003
Page/volume number: Chapter One
Nazneen listens to her neighbours in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
What she missed most was people. Not any peeople in particular (apart, of course, from Hasina) but people. If she put her ear to the wall she could hear sounds. The television was on. Coughing. Sometimes the lavatory flushing. Someone upstairs scraping a chair. A shouting match below. Everyone in their boxes, counting their possessions. In all her eighteen years, she could scarcely remember a moment that she had spent alone. Until she married. And came to London to sit day after day in this large box with the furniture to dust, and the muffled sound of private lives sealed away above, below and around her.