We borrowed a sound meter from a university lab, charged it overnight, and set it on a café table at seven in the morning on a street that residents often describe, with a mixture of complaint and pride, as the loudest in the city. For the next twenty-four hours, we listened.
Morning
At seven the street is surprisingly calm. Delivery vans idle outside shops. A street sweeper passes with a soft, steady whirr. The first trams begin to clatter over the points at the junction, a metallic crash every few minutes that makes the needle jump. A florist is arranging buckets of tulips on the pavement. She has worked here for twenty years.
You stop hearing it after a year, she says. Then you go on holiday and cannot sleep for the quiet. She laughs, and a tram drowns out the rest of her sentence.
Afternoon
By midday the street has filled. Buses, bicycles, a building site two doors down with a jackhammer that starts and stops without warning. Conversations rise to meet the noise, so that the whole street seems to be talking slightly too loudly. The meter settles into a busy, restless range, jumping at every tram and every siren.
A man who lives above a shoe shop invites us upstairs to hear his flat. With the windows shut, the street becomes a distant murmur. With them open, it pours in. He keeps them shut most of the year, he says, and opens them on Sunday mornings, when the street briefly remembers how to whisper.
Night
The loudest hour comes late on Friday. The bars spill onto the pavement, music leaks out of doorways, groups of friends call to each other across the tram tracks. Just before midnight an ambulance forces its way through the crowd, siren wailing, and for a few seconds the meter reads higher than at any other moment of the day.
Then, suddenly, the noise has a shape. It rises and falls with the tram timetable, swells when the bars change music, drops for a moment when everyone looks up at a passing gull. You begin to hear the street as a piece of music rather than a wall of sound: badly performed, perhaps, but full of life.
Four in the morning
By four the street is almost empty. A single taxi waits at the rank. A cleaner hoses down the pavement outside a bar. The meter drops to the lowest reading of the whole day, and in the silence we can hear things that were invisible before: a pigeon on a gutter, a dripping drainpipe, the florist’s delivery van arriving early with the next day’s tulips.
Loud streets, it turns out, are not only loud. They breathe. They have quiet hours, sudden hushes, private rhythms known only to the people who live along them. The loudest street in the city is also, for an hour or so every night, one of the most peaceful.
“You stop hearing it after a year. Then you go on holiday and cannot sleep for the quiet.”
