Two years ago, my most lovingly overbearing and melodramatic auntie came to stay at my flat on an east London high road. Each morning she would emerge, fully dressed except for the eye mask left on her forehead like Chekhov’s gun, taking a few moments to chitchat before erupting: “Aren’t you going to ask how I slept? Just terrible! Sirens! Buses all night, driving sinners around. This noise will kill me. You’ll be sorry when I’m dead!”
Her exclamations may sound over the top. But it turns out that not even the most hyperbolic of relatives could overstate the dangers of this threat, which has lurked unrecognised for too long. Noise in our towns and cities is killing us – and the evidence is piling up.
Residents up and down the country are being regularly exposed to unsafe levels of noise, from Bury to Hartlepool, Wigan to Bristol. Last year, the UN declared London one of the noisiest cities in Europe, with residents regularly being exposed to average levels of 86 decibels, well exceeding the World Health Organization (WHO) safety threshold of 53dB. The result? Hearing loss, shortened life expectancy (the WHO estimates 1m healthy life years are lost to noise in western Europe alone), an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, anxiety, depression and type 2 diabetes. For children, a link is being explored between noise and cognitive development, as well as behavioural issues. Traffic noise is such a physiological stressor it’s been compared to secondhand smoking.
I confess that, for a long time, the only urban noise-related issue that typically got my blood boiling was related to legacy nightlife venues being shuttered to preserve the comfort of a few affluent people who had only just moved in. (For the latest iteration of this, see Manchester’s Night & Day cafe.) Or landlords of overpriced rentals, with walls so thin you can probably hear your neighbour fart, flatly refusing to pay for any soundproofing, no matter what acrimony follows. (I’m sure some day this will be a TV show: Flat-tle Royale, where tenants fight to the death for the right to a good night’s sleep or to watch TV without headphones.)
Noise is, after all, a part of city life – and it cannot be overstated how quickly you get used to it. Writing this article, I checked the decibels of my street using this interactive London map: 70dB, mostly from road transport. Yet I rarely notice the sound. I’m sure the cooking frog rarely notices the temperature either.
The people I hear complaining the most about noise pollution seem to be the monied nimbys, the wealthy curtain-twitchers, or the plain old killjoys (sorry, Auntie!). But research shows it is lower-income residents, more likely to live near motorways, airports and industrial areas, who are the most acutely affected by noise pollution. There are other factors that make some neighbourhoods louder than others. Trees act as an efficient sound damper, yet poorer areas tend to have less green space. Even the maintenance of the road itself can contribute to noise levels; the same car travelling through a wealthy area may sound quieter than when it is travelling through a pothole-ridden road in a poorer one.
Noise pollution is undoubtedly a class issue. It must be, if only those with certain resources can buy their peace, through soundproofing or access to quieter neighbourhoods. And equally, it must be if only those with resources have the luxury of making noise freely – to play their instruments, to have friends over and properly laugh from the belly well after dinner is done – because of where they live.
This is not to say that my ex-neighbour playing his saxophone when he gets in from the pub (and always the cruelly named Careless Whisper) is just an innocent victim of his environment. There is such a thing as personal responsibility and being considerate. But so often in our polarised times, conversations get stuck on the rights and wrongs of the individual – tradespeople with phones ringing so loudly you can hear them from Mars, families with forever barking dogs – when perhaps our collective problem requires a collective solution.
If fingers need to be pointed, we could do much worse than take aim at city leaders failing to implement noise reduction policies. London hasn’t updated its noise pollution strategy since 2004, and lags seriously behind Paris and Barcelona, which have already rolled out sound monitoring. Or we could point at those in the business of property continuing to swerve their soundproofing obligations, and the regulators who let them.
And while I still have my reservations about music venue closures, I would personally like to point a finger at the Madison Square Garden company, which is planning to create a monstrous orb near where I live. It would seem that if the scheme goes ahead as planned, the music and entertainment arena will apparently glow for most hours of the day, be covered with adverts for half the time, and nearly reach the height of Big Ben. Some local residents fear it could be a noise nightmare (and not in that woohoo-avant-garde-music way; more in the capitalism and increased numbers of cars way).
There is one bit of good news, though. In January, the House of Lords science and tech committee launched an inquiry into the impacts of noise and light pollution on human health. Sound pollution is the not so silent killer terrorising our cities, and it is the poorest bearing the brunt. Time to make some noise about it.
Coco Khan is commissioning editor for Guardian B2B, and a columnist and feature writer
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
