George Devo’s weekly column on life in the capital, published every Monday morning…
I’m sitting at the desk of a bedroom I’ve slept in intermittently since the age of 12. I’ve escaped London for a weekend visiting home, in the West-Midlands. On this particularly grey Monday I’m working from home (or WFH to those of you familiar with such needless white collar acronyms).
In front of me sits the cold matte black rectangle of an asleep laptop screen. My hour’s lunch break has been 70 minutes and counting. It’s been a quiet day and I haven’t had to WFH very hard.
Before I attempt to resuscitate my workday, I take one final minute to enjoy doing nothing.
I sit back in my chair and close my eyes. My breathing slows, muscles relax and senses sharpen, and I hear something extraordinary.
Silence.
It had filled the room like a gas, burying into every crevice and wrapping itself around all matter. It was total and blissful silence, and I realised, in that second, that I’d really, desperately, subconsciously missed it.
You don’t notice this when you first move to London, as everything’s new and fascinating. It all looks and feels different to everywhere else and all that stimulation drowns out the obvious – it’s an incredibly noisy city.
Now, I want to make this clear, I’m not complaining. Cue shocked gasps from friends and family.
I get that this is the deal. If you move to a city of 9 million busy, chattering people then you’ll have to listen to their lives happening around your own. I don’t want to come across as a jealous, puritanical NIMBY either – I support thriving nightlife and people living vibrant, full lives. I’d also like to be able to get a drink in central London beyond midnight.
However, I was struck, sitting alone in my teenage bedroom, 15 miles west of Birmingham, by how unnatural it is.
As Stephen Stansfield, a professor at Queen Mary University, was quoted observing in the Evening Standard, “in evolutionary terms, noises were potentially a source of danger”, meaning your body is “programmed to respond” to them.
This means your brain releases chemicals to combat the sound, leading to a higher baseline level of stress and anxiety in loud environments. The World Health Organisation (WHO) also warns that sleep deprivation and heart disease can come from prolonged exposure to high levels of noise.
With this considered, it also becomes a class issue – quieter areas become sought after neighbourhoods by the sonically-downtrodden, the local house prices soar and silence becomes a privilege kept for those who can afford it. Health inequality is driven wider still.
When you accept that we’re just – prepare for as yet unreached levels of profundity – animals trying to live together in little boxes we’ve built, you realise how bizarre tolerating this low level din is. We’ve built towns and cities in a fashion which traps sound, and it doesn’t make for easy cohabitation, just a tenser, snappier population.
The good news for Londoners is that it’s not a binary decision between commuter-belt peace or the London racket. More could be done to reduce the volume now, but, unfortunately, The London Mayoralty’s last plan to combat noise pollution was designed in 2004.
A plan fit for the capital of two decades ago, one where people were unable to loudly play TikTok clips on public transport and joyfully devoid of brightly-decorated tuk tuks blasting Taylor Swift through industrial-grade speakers. It’s not sufficient today.
Some cities are already trying to solve the problem of modern noise pollution. Barcelona’s 2022-2030 strategy has meant the city’s roads being coated in noise-dampening asphalt and lined with greenery, which, planted in large quantities, softens the wailing of traffic. Meanwhile, Paris has installed noise detection devices to monitor and fine particularly noisy drivers during anti-social hours of the day.
Again, whilst I believe that this buzz can make our lives richer and more vivid, it’s also reasonable to try and make its’ tread on our daily lives as light as possible.
Because, reader, although you may not, from your Broomhall flat or Crookes’ terrace, care about how loud London’s streets are, you really should.
It’s a point which lies at the heart of the urban social contract, how we can co-exist as humans in large numbers and remain content. In today’s Britain, we should be able to reap the social rewards of high density living whilst having the foresight to plan against city life devolving into a series of trying disturbances.
Everyone should be able to enjoy what I experienced on that cold winter’s day in the Black Country, eyes-closed, lazily WFH.
Occasionally, we should all have, just a little bit, of quiet.
