What is your favourite popular tune? Mine is an old classic, Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”.
Silence has a whole sound – of nothingness. If you have ever spent more than a minute in an inechoic chamber (where audio engineers can measure sound accurately since there are no echoes or reflections from the walls or other surfaces) the total quiet can be weird, but it’s also a wonderful sensation. I looked at 78 properties for the absence of all road and aircraft noise before I eventually bought this one. All I hear at night is the rain or the mating calls of the foxes and the hoots of our local owl in a tree nearby.
At the other end of the spectrum is Leicester Square. The poor office workers there have been forced to take phone calls in cupboards to get away from the overwhelming noise from the very many buskers playing outside their windows.
Hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us, is other people, and rarely more so when they play amplified songs time and time again at maximum volume to attract the coins of the passers by.
A judge ruled last month that such levels of noise was a public nuisance akin to psychological torture and ordered Westminster Council, the local authority for the area in the heart of London, to bring it to an end.
The court claim against the council had been made by Global Radio, a media firm with offices in the Square, after complaints to the council that their staff were unable to work, and the firm’s complaints to the council had been unheeded.
The firm told the judge that life became intolerable especially when the buskers played out of tune and repeated the same mangled songs constantly. The most irritating was Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”. The manager of the Hippodrome told the court the noise was akin to torture.
In response to the court order the council will be notifying buskers this week in the Square that both pitches are out of bounds until further notice while they consider a possible appeal and any appropriate revisions to the busking regime.
The Council accept they might be regarded as killjoys but they also owe a duty to protect residents and business workers. Since last September the Council has prosecuted seven individuals with fines imposed of up to £1600 and equipment seizures.
That is to be applauded but what for me is worse is the appalling noise of office demolition and construction in our cities. At a previous office off Chancery Lane, the building opposite was being demolished. It was a vile 1960s “brutal” design of bare concrete of zero architectural merit. It must have been designed to be a fortress because the beams were thick with masses of steel all of which required cutting with what resembled a giant lobster’s claws. The dreadful noise as bulky lumps of steel and concrete were dropped into massive skips was really intolerable!!! How the workers did not go deaf or mad even with ear protectors baffled me. That site was truly one of Dante’s lower circles of Hell.
