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 | 1 | 3 | 12 | 12 | 6 | ||
| Open-air markets | 1 | 2 | 2 | |||||
| Road traffic | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||
| Communal living and confinement | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| River traffic and related sounds | 5 | 2 | 3 | |||||
| Plague, war and disaster | 1 | 6 | 2 | 1 | 4 | |||
| Sound qualities of buildings | 1 | |||||||
| Sounds of crowds | 1 | 1 |
Period referred to: 1951
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Times
Type of publication: Newspaper
Author: The Times
Year of publication: 1951
Page/volume number: 16 November 1951
An escaped elephant in New Cross
A five-year old elephant escaped from the New Cross Empire in south-east London yesterday. It was recaptured by circus hands in New Cross post office. An assistant at the post office said: ‘We had quite a queue of old-age pensioners. There was a loud trumpeting, and through the swing doors appeared an elephant. Our queue disappeared like magic into telephone boxes and on, to and over the counter. We didn’t lose even a stamp'.
Note: This reference was originally spotted on the Transpontine blog.
Period referred to: 1857
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Little Dorrit
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Charles Dickens
Year of publication: 1857
Page/volume number: Chapter 14
Little Dorrit travels across London at night
They had shrunk past homeless people, lying coiled up in nooks. They had run from drunkards. They had started from slinking men, whistling and signing to one another at bye corners, or running away at full speed. Though everywhere the leader and the guide, Little Dorrit, happy for once in her youthful appearance, feigned to cling to and rely upon Maggy. And more than once some voice, from among a knot of brawling or prowling figures in their path, had called out to the rest to 'let the woman and the child go by!'
So, the woman and the child had gone by, and gone on, and five had sounded from the steeples.
Period referred to: 1716
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Trivia
Type of publication: Poem
Author: John Gay
Year of publication: 1716
Page/volume number: n/a
London in 1716: excerpts from John Gay’s Trivia
When the Black Youth at chosen Stands rejoice,
And clean your Shoes resounds from ev’ry Voice;
When late their miry Sides Stage-Coaches show,
And their stiff Horses through the Town move slow;
When all the Mall in leafy Ruin lies,
And Damsels first renew their Oyster Cries
[. . .]
When Sleep is first disturb’d by Morning Cries;
From sure Prognosticks learn to know the Skies,
Lest you of Rheums and Coughs at Night complain;
Surpriz’d in dreary Fogs or driving Rain.
[. . .]
But when the swinging Signs your Ears offend
With creaking Noise, then rainy Floods impend;
Soon shall the Kennels swell with rapid Streams,
And rush in muddy Torrents to the Thames.
[. . .]
Good Huswives all the Winter’s Rage despise,
Defended by the Riding-hood’s Disguise:
Or underneath th’ Umbrella’s oily Shed,
Safe thro’ the Wet, on clinking Pattens tread.
[. . .]
Here Rows of Drummers stand in martial File,
And with their Vellom-Thunder shake the Pile,
To greet the new-made Bride. Are Sounds like these
The proper Prelude to a State of Peace?
Now Industry awakes her busy Sons,
Full charg’d with News the breathless Hawker runs:
Shops open, Coaches roll, Carts shake the Ground,
And all the Streets with passing Cries resound.
[. . .]
Now dawns the Morn, the sturdy Lad awakes,
Leaps from his Stall, his tangled Hair he shakes,
Then leaning o’er the Rails, he musing stood,
And view’d below the black Canal of Mud,
Where common Sewers a lulling murmur keep,
Whose Torrents rush from Holborn’s fatal Steep
[. . .]
The Youth strait chose his Post; the Labour ply’d
Where branching Streets from Charing-cross divide;
His treble Voice resounds along the Meuse,
And White-hall echoes—Clean your Honour’s Shoes.
[. . .]
Here laden Carts with thundring Waggons meet,
Wheels clash with Wheels, and bar the narrow Street;
The lashing Whip resounds, the Horses strain,
And Blood in anguish bursts the swelling Vein.
[. . .]
Booths sudden hide the Thames, long Streets appear,
And num’rous Games proclaim the crouded Fair.
So when a Gen’ral bids the martial Train
Spread their Encampment o’er the spatious Plain;
Thick-rising Tents a Canvas City build,
And the loud Dice resound thro’ all the Field.
[. . .]
When Rosemary, and Bays, the Poet’s Crown,
Are bawl’d, in frequent Cries, through all the Town,
Then judge the Festival of Christmas near,
Christmas, the joyous Period of the Year.
[. . .]
Now all the Pavement sounds with trampling Feet,
And the mixt Hurry barricades the Street.
Entangled here, the Waggon’s lengthen’d Team
Cracks the tough Harness; Here a pond’rous Beam
Lies over-turn’d athwart; For Slaughter fed,
Here lowing Bullocks raise their horned Head.
Now Oaths grow loud, with Coaches Coaches jar,
And the smart Blow provokes the sturdy War;
From the high Box they whirl the Thong around,
And with the twining Lash their Shins resound:
Their Rage ferments, more dang’rous Wounds they try,
And the Blood gushes down their painful Eye.
[. . .]
Here dives the skulking Thief with practis’d Slight,
And unfelt Fingers make thy Pocket light.
Where’s now thy Watch, with all its Trinkets, flown?
And thy late Snuff-Box is no more thy own.
But lo! his bolder Theft some Tradesman spies,
Swift from his Prey the scudding Lurcher flies;
Dext’rous he scapes the Coach with nimble Bounds,
Whilst ev’ry honest Tongue Stop Thief resounds.
[. . .]
Let not the Ballad-Singer’s shrilling Strain
Amid the Swarm thy list’ning Ear detain:
Guard well thy Pocket; for these Syrens stand,
To aid the Labours of the diving Hand
[. . .]
Where Lincoln’s-Inn, wide Space, is rail’d around,
Cross not with vent’rous Step; there oft’ is found
The lurking Thief, who while the Day-light shone,
Made the Walls echo with his begging Tone:
That Crutch which late compassion mov’d, shall wound
Thy bleeding Head, and fell thee to the Ground.
Though thou art tempted by the Link-Man’s Call,
Yet trust him not along the lonely Wall;
In the Mid-way he’ll quench the flaming Brand,
And share the Booty with the pilf’ring Band.
[. . .]
But hark! Distress with screaming Voice draws nigh’r,
And wakes the slumb’ring Street with Cries of Fire.
At first a glowing Red enwraps the Skies,
And born by Winds the scatt’ring Sparks arise;
From Beam to Beam, the fierce Contagion spreads;
The spiry Flames now lift aloft their Heads,
Through the burst Sash a blazing Deluge pours,
And splitting Tiles descend in rattling Show’rs.
Period referred to: 1951
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Royal Festival Hall: The Official Record
Type of publication: Official publication
Author: Max Parrish
Year of publication: 1951
Page/volume number: Unknown
1950s London: ‘the whistles of locomotives, the sounding of steamer sirens’
London, like all large cities, has an unceasing backgound of noise, the low, even rumble of its immense and widespread traffic, against which intermittent sharper sounds from far and near are audible – the whistles of locomotives, the sounding of steamer sirens and motor horns, the rattling and clanking of trains and trams, the sounds of hammering, drilling and riveting, the backfiring of engines and the sounds of nearby shouts and barks.
Many thanks to Matt Dixon for this reference.
Period referred to: 1840
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Old Curiosity Shop
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Charles Dickens
Year of publication: 1840
Page/volume number: Chapter 1
London footsteps in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop
That constant pacing to and fro, that never-ending restlessness, that incessant tread of feet wearing the rough stones smooth and glossy – is it not a wonder how the dwellers in narrows ways can bear to hear it! Think of a sick man in such a place as Saint Martin's Court, listening to the footsteps, and in the midst of pain and weariness obliged, despite himself (as though it were a task he must perform) to detect the child's step from the man's, the slipshod beggar from the booted exquisite, the lounging from the busy, the dull heel of the sauntering outcast from the quick tread of an expectant pleasure-seeker – think of the hum and noise always being present to his sense, and of the stream of life that will not stop, pouring on, on, on, through all his restless dreams, as if he were condemned to lie, dead but conscious, in a noisy churchyard, and had no hope of rest for centuries to come.
Period referred to: 1940s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Rosie Hogarth
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Alexander Baron
Year of publication: 1951
Page/volume number: Not known
‘A constant din of altercation and neighbourly intercourse’: Angel Islington in the 1940s
The roads that meet at the Angel are as ugly as any in the ugly sprawl of London. But a hundred yards away, in the back streets, there is a quietness and serenity that keeps the traffic's roar at bay and even holds sway over the crying of babies and the shrill chatter of women that ascends from basement windows. [. . .] It is only in the little side turnings that connect these larger thoroughfares that dirt, noise, overcrowding and the sense of haste come into their own; in each of these little streets a constant din of altercation and neighbourly intercourse echoes across the narrow pavements.
Period referred to: 1945
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: London's Natural History
Type of publication: Wildlife guide
Author: R. S. R. Fitter
Year of publication: 1945
Page/volume number: Unknown
The sounds of waterfowl at Barn Elms
Barn Elms has become one of the loci classici of British bird-watching. The author, in a comparatively few visits, has seen such remarkable sights as a grey phalarope, buoyant as a cork, bobbing on the diminutive waves of the reservoir; a loon uttering its weird haunting wail before launching its cigar-shaped form into the air; a vast pack of nearly two thousand pochard and tufted duck huddled together in the cold spell of 1938-39; and the incomparable sight of mute swans, the Catalinas of the bird world, taking off with laboured strokes of their great wings across half the reservoir, flying with ponderous grace and that matchless avian sound ‘hompa, hompa, hompa, hompa’, over Ranelagh and Barnes, to descend again on the far side of the water with a loud swishing sound as their breasts create a sizeable bow-wave.
Period referred to: 1959
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: To Sir, With Love
Type of publication: Novel
Author: E. R. Braithwaite
Year of publication: 1959
Page/volume number: Chapter 1
Charwomen’s banter on board a 1950s London bus
The crowded red double-decker bus inched its way through the snarl of traffic in Aldgate. It was almost as if it was reluctant to get rid of the overload of noisy, earthy charwomen it had collected on its run through the city [. . .]
They joshed and chivvied each other and the conductor in an endless stream of lewdly suggestive remarks and retorts, quite careless of being overheard by me – a Negro, and the only other male on the bus. The conductor, a lively, quick-witted fellow, seemed to know them all well enough to address them on very personal terms, and kept them in noisy good humour with a stream of quips and pleasantries to which they made reply in kind. Sex seemed little more than a joke to them, a conversation piece which alternated with their comments on the weather, and their vividly detailed discussions on their actual or imagined ailments.
I sat sandwiched between a window and a very larhe woman whose great dimpled arms hugged her shopping bag in her lap. She kept up a ribald duet with a crony sitting immediately in front of her.
"What've you got for the Old Man's dinner, Gert?"
Gert's square body remained ponderously immobile, but she turned her head around as far as her massive neck would permit and rejoined:
"He'll be lucky to get bread and dripping today, he will."
"He can't do you much good on bread and dripping, Gert."
"Feeding him on steak and chikcen won't make no difference neither, Rose. Never mind, he keeps me back warm."
All this was said in a tone intentionally loud enough to entertain everyone, and the women showed their appreciation by cackling loudly, rocking their bodies as much as the crowding permitted.
Period referred to: 1974
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Soft City
Type of publication: Popular sociology
Author: Jonathan Raban
Year of publication: 1974
Page/volume number: Chapter 8
Sounds of transience in 1970s Earls Court
I moved from Islington to Earl's Court, where motion and migration are the area's most constant, most evident features. It is under the flight-path to Heathrow and the pneumatic whoosh of low-flying jets punctuates the day at five-minute intervals. Container trucks speed north and south on either side of the square where I live, and the reverberations of a tube line somewhere nearby deep in the earth makes the top storey shudder on still evenings.
Period referred to: 1900s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Inside Out: An Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of Space
Type of publication: Essay
Author: Adrian Stokes
Year of publication: 1947
Page/volume number:
‘The seat of the greatest potential noise’ in Kensington Gardens
The best epitome of massive, meticulous incoherence provided by the Park, was the Magazine at the end of the Serpentine Bridge. Explosive powder stood stored in this building of grey brick. A sentry always marched outside, and for all I know, does so to this day. Potential murder and death were guarded with careful pageantry. Except for the sentry’s footfall there was a silence about the place, the seat of the greatest potential noise.
Period referred to: 1900s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Inside Out: An Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of Space
Type of publication: Essay
Author: Adrian Stokes
Year of publication: 1947
Page/volume number:
Park sounds by the Serpentine in Edwardian London
The walk home was marked by the passage underneath the Serpentine bridge. The dirty echoing tunnel with its lingering airs was cold at all times of the year. It was as if the passage lay beneath the dark water, here at its deepest according to a notice of warning. A dog would be barking like Cereberus. In view of the thunderous echoes, additional heads would have been in keeping.
Period referred to: 1900s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Inside Out: An Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of Space
Type of publication: Essay
Author: Adrian Stokes
Year of publication: 1947
Page/volume number:
Noises from the engine house powering the Kensington Gardens fountains
The machine house of the fountains, for instance, had an ominous air. A scour of mysterious steam hung over a sunken tank at the back of the engine house and was apprehended at the same time as the smell of oil and the clanking of the lethal cylinders. The cold and grinding mechanism was housed in Portland stone of a late Victorian style, both white and darkened.
Period referred to: 1974
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Soft City
Type of publication: Popular sociology
Author: Jonathan Raban
Year of publication: 1972
Page/volume number: Chapter 1
Earl’s Court at night in Jonathan Raban’s Soft City
I am woken in the small hours by the sound of a girl achieving her climax; a deep shriek of pleasure that has nothing to do with me. I can hear her man sigh as close as if he and I were under the same sheet. On another night, a TV blares through an open window with a late-late show. On another, a woman is crying, a miserable train of broken hiccups. A man – I can hear his feet crackling on the bare boards – says: 'Shut up. Why don't you bloody well shut up?' Then there are nights of joke-hashing: someone mutters like a priest going quickly through a private office, followed by burst of yelling adenoidal laughter. The routine is repeated, and repeated; I fall asleep, alone, with Australians in my ears.
Period referred to: 1920s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Midnight Bell
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Patrick Hamilton
Year of publication: 1929
Page/volume number: Chapter XLII
A prostitute’s lodgings in 1920s Fitzrovia
At this point they reached Bolsover Street. This starts off with tall and newly erected buildings, but soon dwindles down into the drab and decayed slum which actually it is. She took him to a door not far down. The house was of four stories, and seemed to be untenanted. [. . .] She let herself in with a large key, and they found themselves in a dark passage which chilled Bob's soul, but which had no such effect upon Prunella, whose dainty high heels went clock-clocking up the bar wooden stairs. He followed. On each landing three different doors led into three different rooms containing three different families. All the doors were closed, but the awful belligerence of the poor was to be heard and sensed. On the first floor a man was reviling a woman, and a child, in another room, screaming. It did this not as though it was being beaten (which it possibly was) but as though it was being put to death. On the second floor someone was playing a harmonica, but in the front room an old woman groaned. You could not imagine what at, unless it was the harmonica. On the third floor two other children were being put to death.
Period referred to: 1930s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Water Gypsies
Type of publication: Novel
Author: A. P. Herbert
Year of publication: 1930
Page/volume number: Chapter X
‘This horrid little smelly box of silence’: calling from a 1930s phonebox
But she had only once used the telephone before, and she read the directions very quickly twice. She took off the receiver and listened, trembling; her heart beat more wildly far than it had beaten for Ernest's speech.
A cool voice said startlingly, 'Number, please?' and, stammering, she gave the number. Nothing happened. The lady who had telephoned before her opened the door and said, 'Sorry, I left my bag.' A voice said wearily, 'Two pennies, please.' She put one penny in the slot, dropped another, and at last, breathless with agitation, heard a voice say, 'Hullo!' [. . .]
There was a sort of click, and then silence. This was the end of her expectations, the sudden grave of Love's Bliss, this horrid smelly little box of silence.
Period referred to: 1820s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Lavengro
Type of publication: Novel/memoir
Author: George Borrow
Year of publication: 1851
Page/volume number: Chapter XXIX
Early nineteenth century street sounds in George Borrow’s Lavengro
And there I continued in thought before the fire, until my eyes closed, and I fell asleep; which was not to be wondered at, after the fatigue and cold which I had lately undergone on the coach-top; and, in my sleep, I imagined myself still there, amidst darkness and rain, hurrying now over wild heaths, and now along roads overhung with thick and umbrageous trees, and sometimes methought I heard the horn of the guard, and sometimes the voice of the coachman, now chiding, now encouraging his horses, as they toiled through the deep and miry ways. At length a tremendous crack of a whip saluted the tympanum of my ear, and I started up broad awake, nearly oversetting the chair on which I reclined—and, lo! I was in the dingy room before the fire, which was by this time half extinguished. In my dream I had confounded the noise of the street with those of my night-journey; the crack which had aroused me I soon found proceeded from the whip of a carter, who, with many oaths, was flogging his team below the window.
Period referred to: 1930s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Hangover Square
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Patrick Hamilton
Year of publication: 1939
Page/volume number: The First Part, Chapter 5
Liverpool Street station in Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square
The wheels and track clicked out the familiar and unmistakable rhythm – the sly, gentle suggestive rhythm, unlike any of its others, of a train entering a major London terminus, and he was filled with unease and foreboding as he always was by this sound. Thought and warmth must give place to action in cold streets – reality, buses, tubes, booking-offices, life again, electric-lit London, endless terrors.
Oh dear! – here we were – here was the platform under the huge roof – hollow, hellish echoing noises as in a swimming bath, and the porters lined up for the attack – no getting out of it now!
Period referred to: 1900s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Nighrts in London
Type of publication: Journalism/social investigation
Author: Thomas Burke
Year of publication: 1915
Page/volume number: A Lonely Night
Night-time sounds of Kingsland Road
My first night was the same as every other. My window looked out on a church tower which still further preyed on the wan light of the street, and, as I lay in bed, its swart height, pierced by the lit clock face, gloated stiffly over me. From back of beyond a furry voice came dolefully—
Goo bay to sum-mer, goo bay, goo baaaaay!
That song has thrilled and chilled me ever since. Next door an Easy Payments piano was being tortured by wicked fingers that sought after the wild grace of Weber's "Invitation to the Valse." From the street the usual London night sounds floated up until well after midnight. There was the dull, pessimistic tramp of the constable, and the long rumble of the Southwark-bound omnibus. Sometimes a stray motor-car would hoot and jangle in the distance, swelling to a clatter as it passed, and falling away in a pathetic diminuendo. A traction-engine grumbled its way along, shaking foundations and setting bed and ornaments a-trembling. Then came the blustering excitement of chucking-out at the "Galloping Horses." Half a dozen wanted to fight; half a dozen others wanted to kiss; everybody wanted to live in amity and be jollyolpal. A woman's voice cried for her husband, and abused a certain Long Charlie; and Long Charlie demanded with piteous reiteration: "Why don't I wanter fight? Eh? Tell me that. Why don't I wanter fight? Did you 'ear what he called me? Did you 'ear? He called me a—a—what was it he called me?"
Then came police, disbandment, and dark peace, as the strayed revellers melted into the night. Sometimes there would sound the faint tinkle of a belated hansom, chiming solitarily, as though weary of frivolity. And then a final stillness of which the constable's step seemed but a part.
Period referred to: 1900s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Nights in London
Type of publication: Journalism/social investigation
Author: Thomas Burke
Year of publication: 1915
Page/volume number: A Chinese Night
Thomas Burke explores Limehouse
But we were out for amusement, so, after the table hospitality, Sam took us into the Causeway. Out of the coloured darkness of Pennyfields came the muffled wail of reed instruments, the heart-cry of the Orient; noise of traffic; bits of honeyed talk. On every side were following feet: the firm, clear step of the sailor; the loud, bullying boots of the tough; the joyful steps that trickle from "The Green Man"; and, through all this chorus, most insistently, the stealthy, stuttering steps of the satyr. [. . .]
Every window, as always, was closely shuttered, but between the joints shot jets of slim light, and sometimes you could catch the chanting of a little sweet song last sung in Rangoon or Swatow. One of these songs was once translated for me. I should take great delight in printing it here, but, alas! this, too, comes from a land where purity crusades are unknown. I dare not conjecture what Bayswater would do to me if I reproduced it.
We passed through Pennyfields, through clusters of gladly coloured men. Vaguely we remembered leaving Henrietta Street, London, and dining in Old Compton Street, Paris, a few hours ago. And now—was this Paris or London or Tuan-tsen or Taiping? Pin-points of light pricked the mist in every direction. A tom-tom moaned somewhere in the far-away.
Period referred to: Early 1900s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: People of the Abyss
Type of publication: Social investigation
Author: Jack London
Year of publication: 1903
Page/volume number: Chapter 5
Jack London hears East End women fighting
As I write this, and for an hour past, the air has been made hideous by a free-for-all, rough-and-tumble fight going on in the yard that is back to back with my yard. When the first sounds reached me I took it for the barking and snarling of dogs, and some minutes were required to convince me that human beings, and women at that, could produce such a fearful clamour.
Drunken women fighting! It is not nice to think of; it is far worse to listen to. Something like this it runs –
Incoherent babble, shrieked at the top of the lungs of several women; a lull, in which is heard a child crying and a young girl’s voice pleading tearfully; a woman’s voice rises, harsh and grating, “You ’it me! Jest you ’it me!” then, swat! challenge accepted and fight rages afresh.
The back windows of the houses commanding the scene are lined with enthusiastic spectators, and the sound of blows, and of oaths that make one’s blood run cold, are borne to my ears. Happily, I cannot see the combatants.
A lull; “You let that child alone!” child, evidently of few years, screaming in downright terror. “Awright,” repeated insistently and at top pitch twenty times straight running; “you’ll git this rock on the ’ead!” and then rock evidently on the head from the shriek that goes up.
A lull; apparently one combatant temporarily disabled and being resuscitated; child’s voice audible again, but now sunk to a lower note of terror and growing exhaustion.
Voices begin to go up the scale, something like this:-
“Yes?”
“Yes!”
“Yes?”
“Yes!”
“Yes?”
“Yes!”
“Yes?”
“Yes!”
Sufficient affirmation on both sides, conflict again precipitated. One combatant gets overwhelming advantage, and follows it up from the way the other combatant screams bloody murder. Bloody murder gurgles and dies out, undoubtedly throttled by a strangle hold.
Entrance of new voices; a flank attack; strangle hold suddenly broken from the way bloody murder goes up half an octave higher than before; general hullaballoo, everybody fighting.
Lull; new voice, young girl’s, “I’m goin’ ter tyke my mother’s part;” dialogue, repeated about five times, “I’ll do as I like, blankety, blank, blank!” “I’d like ter see yer, blankety, blank, blank!” renewed conflict, mothers, daughters, everybody, during which my landlady calls her young daughter in from the back steps, while I wonder what will be the effect of all that she has heard upon her moral fibre.
Period referred to: 1880s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Secret Agent
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Joseph Conrad
Year of publication: 1907
Page/volume number: Chapter 4
Joseph Conrad depicts an Islington street in the 1880s
However, he ventured another question. “Did you walk down here?”
“No; omnibus,” the little man answered readily enough. He lived far away in Islington, in a small house down a shabby street, littered with straw and dirty paper, where out of school hours a troop of assorted children ran and squabbled with a shrill, joyless, rowdy clamour.
Period referred to: 1880s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Secret Agent
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Joseph Conrad
Year of publication: 1907
Page/volume number: Chapter 2
A walk through Belgravia in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent
Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr Verloc took a turn to the left out of the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of swaying omnibuses and trotting vans, in the almost silent, swift flow of hansoms [. . .] And Mr Verloc, steady like a rock – a soft kind of rock – marched now along a street which could with every propriety be described as private. In its breadth, emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of inorganic nature, of matter that never dies. The only reminder of mortality was a doctor’s brougham arrested in august solitude close to the curbstone. The polished knockers of the doors gleamed as far as the eye could reach, the clean windows shone with a dark opaque lustre. And all was still. But a milk cart rattled noisily across the distant perspective; a butcher boy, driving with the noble recklessness of a charioteer at Olympic Games, dashed round the corner sitting high above a pair of red wheels.
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 people 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.
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 XXX
The clamour of life in the Farringdon Road Buildings
What terrible barracks, those Farringdon Road Buildings! . . . The yells of children at play in the courtyard tortured her nerves; the regular sounds on the staircase, day after day repeated at the same hours, incidents of the life of poverty, irritated her sick brain and filled her with despair to think that as long as she lived she could never hope to rise again above this world to which she was born.
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 XXX
George Gissing describes the sounds of Waterloo Station
Waterloo Station is a convenient rendezvous; its irregular form provides many corners of retirement, out-of-the-way recesses where talk can be carried on in something like privacy. To one of these secluded spots Scawthorne drew aside with the veiled woman who met him at the entrance from Waterloo Road. So closely was her face shrouded, that he had at first a difficulty in catching the words she addressed to him. The noise of an engine getting up steam, the rattle of cabs and porters' barrows, the tread and voices of a multitude of people made fitting accompaniment to a dialogue which in every word presupposed the corruptions and miseries of a centre of modern life.
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: 1660s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Type of publication: Diary
Author: Samuel Pepys
Year of publication: 1667
Page/volume number: 1 July 1667
‘Waked by a damned noise between a sow gelder and a cow and a dog’
Up betimes, about 9 o'clock, waked by a damned noise between a sow gelder and a cow and a dog, nobody after we were up being able to tell us what it was.
Period referred to: Late 29th century
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Year of publication: 1886
Page/volume number: Search for Mr Hyde
The quietness of night-time London in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
It was a fine dry night; frost in the air; the streets as clean as a ballroom floor; the lamps, unshaken, by any wind, drawing a regular pattern of light and shadow. By ten o'clock, when the shops were closed, the by-street was very solitary and, in spite of the low growl of London from all round, very silent. Small sounds carried far; domestic sounds out of the houses were clearly audible on either side of the roadway; and the rumour of the approach of any passenger preceded him by a long time. Mr. Utterson had been some minutes at his post, when he was aware of an odd, light footstep drawing near. In the course of his nightly patrols, he had long grown accustomed to the quaint effect with which the footfalls of a single person, while he is still a great way off, suddenly spring out distinct from the vast hum and clatter of the city.
Period referred to: 1850s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Bleak House
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Charles Dickens
Year of publication: 1853
Page/volume number: Chapter XLVIII
A moonlit London night in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House
A very quiet night. When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life [. . .] even on this stranger's wilderness of London there is some rest. Its steeples and towers and its one great dome grow more ethereal; its smoky house-tops lose their grossness in the pale effulgence; the noises that arise from the streets are fewer and are softened, and the footsteps on the pavements pass more tranquilly away. In these fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn's inhabiting, where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in the fold by hook and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close, every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.
What's that? Who fired a gun or pistol? Where was it?
The few foot-passengers start, stop, and stare about them. Some windows and doors are opened, and people come out to look. It was a loud report and echoed and rattled heavily. It shook one house, or so a man says who was passing. It has aroused all the dogs in the neighbourhood, who bark vehemently. Terrified cats scamper across the road. While the dogs are yet barking and howling—there is one dog howling like a demon—the church-clocks, as if they were startled too, begin to strike. The hum from the streets, likewise, seems to swell into a shout. But it is soon over. Before the last clock begins to strike ten, there is a lull. When it has ceased, the fine night, the bright large moon, and multitudes of stars, are left at peace again.
Period referred to: 1850s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Bleak House
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Charles Dickens
Year of publication: 1853
Page/volume number: Chapter X
Holborn traffic and a cock crowing in Bleak House
Peffer is never seen in Cook's Court now. He is not expected there, for he has been recumbent this quarter of a century in the churchyard of St. Andrews, Holborn, with the waggons and hackney-coaches roaring past him all the day and half the night like one great dragon. If he ever steal forth when the dragon is at rest to air himself again in Cook's Court until admonished to return by the crowing of the sanguine cock in the cellar at the little dairy in Cursitor Street, whose ideas of daylight it would be curious to ascertain [. . .]
Period referred to: 1960s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The London Nobody Knows
Type of publication: City guide
Author: Geoffrey Fletcher
Year of publication: 1962
Page/volume number: Not known
Saturday morning in Deptford High Street, 1962
Saturday morning is the time to see the human element at its richest in Deptford, and in the crowded High Street are all sorts of buskers and street entertainers whose presence gives additional character to the street: an organ grinder, perhaps, whose instrument is more properly termed ‘a street piano’ (there is still one firm left hiring out the’ pianos’ in London, near Saffron Hill: look for the pictures of Edwardian beauties on the panels of the organ), one-man bands, sellers of Old Moore’s Almanack and so on. Today, a couple of stocky, red-faced men take their stand under the railway bridge - one plays an accordion and the other sings ‘The Mountains of Mourne’. Appropriately, too, for Irish ideas are not lacking in Deptford - witness the large pub charmingly named The Harp of Erin and here today at the Catholic Church a gaudy Irish wedding takes place. As the bride and groom assemble on the steps, they are joined by their families and friends, the women in pale blue and the men in navy-blue suits. All wear large pink carnations, and the men’s faces, each creased in a wide grin, are all red from the application of yellow soap. Small boys, also in blue suits and with even shinier faces, cross their legs uneasily, and the accordion plays ‘The Meeting of the Waters’ . . .
Period referred to: Early 1920s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Mrs Dalloway
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Virginia Woolf
Year of publication: 1925
Page/volume number: Not known
The sounds of Big Ben and Victoria Street in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’
For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,— one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
Period referred to: 1840s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Dombey and Son
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Charles Dickens
Year of publication: 1846-48
Page/volume number: Chapter 9
A secondhand shop described in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son
A set of window curtains with no windows belonging to them, would be seen gracefully draping a barricade of chests of drawers, loaded with little jars from chemists' shops; while a homeless hearthrug severed from its natural companion the fireside, braved the shrewd east wind in its adversity, and trembled in melancholy accord with the shrill complainings of a cabinet piano, wasting away, a string a day, and faintly resounding to the noises of the street in its jangling and distracted brain.
Period referred to: 1870s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Travels in the Air
Type of publication: Travel/Autobiography
Author: James Glaisher
Year of publication: 1871
Page/volume number: Not known
London heard from a balloon
I have seen London by night. I have crossed it during the day at the height of four miles. I have often admired the splendour of sky scenery, but never have I seen anything which surpassed this spectacle. The roar of the town heard at this elevation [7,000 feet] was a deep, rich, continuous sound—the voice of labour. At four miles above London, all was hushed; no sound reached our ears.
Period referred to: 1820s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Letter to Alexander Carlyle
Type of publication: Private correspondence
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Year of publication: 1824
Page/volume number: 14 December 1824
Thomas Carlyle describes London life in 1824
You are packed into paltry shells of brick-houses (calculated to endure for forty years, and then fall); every door that slams to in the street is audible in your most secret chamber [. . .] and when you issue from your door, you are assailed by vast shoals of quacks, and showmen, and street sweepers, and pick-pockets, and mendicants of every degree and shape, all plying in noise or silent craft their several vocations, all in their hearts like ‘lions ravening for their prey.’
Period referred to: 1590s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Skialethia, or a Shadow of Truth
Type of publication: Satiric verse
Author: Edward Guilpin
Year of publication: 1598
Page/volume number: Not known
‘There squeaks a cart wheel, here a tumbrel rumbles’
There squeaks a cart wheel,
Here a tumbrel rumbles,
Here scolds an old bawd,
There a porter grumbles.
Period referred to: End of 17th century
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The London Spy
Type of publication: Journal/Social investigation
Author: Ned Ward
Year of publication: 1698-1700
Page/volume number: Chapter II
‘The music of sundry passing-bells, the rattling of coaches’
[. . .] for tho' we thought it ten o'clock when we left the blessings of dear Hymen's palace, yet it prov'd but the misers' bedtime, the modest hour of nine being just proclaim'd by Time's oracle from every steeple. The joyful alarm of Bow Bell call'd the weary apprentices from their work to unhitch their folded shutters and button up their shops till the next morning.
[. . .]
My ears were so serenaded on every side with the music of sundry passing-bells, the rattling of coaches, and the melancholy ditties of Hot Baked Wardens [pears] and Pippins! that had I as many eyes as Argus and as many ears as Fame, they would have been all confounded, for nothing could I see but light, and nothing hear but noise.
Period referred to: 1660s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Type of publication: Diary
Author: Samuel Pepys
Year of publication: 1660
Page/volume number: November 1660
‘I took much pleasure to have the neighbours
come forth into the yard to hear me’
So home to dinner, and so to the office all the afternoon, and at night to my viallin (the first time that I have played on it since I came to this house) in my dining room, and afterwards to my lute there, and I took much pleasure to have the neighbours come forth into the yard to hear me.
Period referred to: 1660s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Type of publication: Diary
Author: Samuel Pepys
Year of publication: 1660
Page/volume number: November 1660
Pepys and his wife are kept awake by a smoke-jack
The last night I should have mentioned how my wife and I were troubled all night with the sound of drums in our ears, which in the morning we found to be Mr. Davys's jack, but not knowing the cause of its going all night, I understand to-day that they have had a great feast to-day.
[A smoke-jack was a device lodged in a chimney flue, with a fan of blades like that of a jet turbine. Hot air rising up the chimney caused the fan to rotate, and this motion was transmitted downwards by gears to turn a meat-spit in the fireplace.]
Period referred to: 1660s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Type of publication: Diary
Author: Samuel Pepys
Year of publication: 1660
Page/volume number: February 1660
‘A drum came by, beating of a strange manner of beat’
After supper home, and before going to bed I staid writing of this day its passages, while a drum came by, beating of a strange manner of beat, now and then a single stroke, which my wife and I wondered at, what the meaning of it should be.
Period referred to: 1660s
Sound category: Ambient > General street sounds
Title of work: The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Type of publication: Diary
Author: Samuel Pepys
Year of publication: 1660
Page/volume number: January 1660
A dog’s barking keeps Samuel Pepys awake
Having been exceedingly disturbed in the night with the barking of a dog of one of our neighbours that I could not sleep for an hour or two, I slept late, and then in the morning took physic, and so staid within all day.
Period referred to: 1850s
Sound category: Ambient > Voices in the street
Title of work: The Three Clerks
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Anthony Trollope
Year of publication: 1858
Page/volume number: Unknown
‘Shrill voices shrieked at him as he passed’
He went along the Strand, over the crossing under the statue of Charles on horseback, and up Pall Mall East till he came to the opening into the park under the Duke of York's column. The London night world was alive as he made his way. From the Opera Colonnade shrill voices shrieked at him as he passed, and drunken men coming down from the night supper-houses in the Haymarket saluted him with affectionate cordiality. The hoarse waterman from the cabstand, whose voice had perished in the night air, croaked out at him the offer of a vehicle [. . .]