The Art of Noise

The changing aural landscape of St Giles in the Fields

Central St Giles • Photograph: Jackie Hopfinger

As you stand on the corner of Flitcroft Street and Denmark Street, just off Charing Cross Road, next to the church of St Giles in the Fields, close your eyes and listen. This is where the history of London’s noise begins.

The revving of engines, the rumble of buses and trucks, courier motorcyclists cutting through the traffic, the hum and chatter of indistinct conversations, somewhere a siren, the constant drilling and hammering from a nearby construction site, music from an open window. London’s a noisy city. It always has been.

Now, imagine stepping back three hundred years. Still very noisy, but a different noise. What do you hear?

Horses hooves and carriage wheels clattering over uneven cobbles. The whinnying of horses and the calls of drivers. The clank of a smith’s hammer. The street entertainers - the buskers and jugglers, acrobats and musicians hustling for farthings on what was then Broad Street dead ahead of us. The incessant cries of costermongers - the peddlers, street sellers and vendors - hawking their wares with lively and persuasive chants add to this chaotic and loud urban soundscape.

If we think this was noisy, then we should be standing here on the day of a public hanging. Except we couldn’t. We’re standing on the very spot where they put up the gallows. And we’ve not even mentioned the bells yet.

Londoners have long made an art out of noise, and we see evidence of it in the music created in the city. A once cacophonous symphony of noise that defined this bustling metropolis, we find its echoes in London’s musicals and satires, in its advertising jingles and popular songs. The noise and ways of life that create that noise is the audible landscape upon which London’s music is built. Its contours provide the attention seeking, the sense of theatricality, the hustling and bustling, the occasional violence, the shock and awe, and in its finer moments the joyous sound of community. There’s a unique audible energy to London. You can hear it. You can feel it.

While the corner we’re standing on is strictly speaking outside Soho, it’s probably the best place to appreciate this changing aural landscape, how it is embedded in the city’s identity, and laid the foundations of London’s popular music.

The sound of bells

Bells are time machines. While the sounds of horses’ hooves and costermongers' cries have faded, the very same bells that rang out in the 1720s still echo today, bridging past and present in London’s soundscape. They are the one and only sound that has endured down the centuries. They take us back in time to when churches were the city’s tallest buildings, and the sound of their bells rang out loud across the rooftops. They still define London, and of course many Londoners.

A German Duke turning up in 1602 was struck by the deafening ringing, pealing and tolling of the bells, writing: “On arriving in London we heard a great ringing of bells in almost all the churches going on very late in the evening… the young people do that for the sake of exercise and amusement.” From other accounts there’s the suggestion that the harmony of the bells somehow is to demonstrate the harmony of the city, the health of its citizens, and the theatricality that also is intrinsic to London. Other visitors to the city from that time contend that the repeated sound of bells, canons and drums suggested that Londoners simply had a taste for loud noises.

There are eight bells in the church of St Giles in the Fields, four of which would have been heard three hundred years ago. Today you can hear them for an hour every Thursday from 12.30pm. But they weren’t always so restricted in their ringing. In 1660 when Charles II was rapturously welcomed into London, the bells of St Giles rang for three whole days.

Bells not only played a significant role in London's soundscape, but they also defined what it was to be a Londoner. A Cockney is one who is born within the sound of Bow Bells, which has made St Mary-le-Bow the most famous parish church in the world. It is suggested that the word ‘Cockney’ refers to the weathercock that once surmounted the belfry. Without the weathercock perhaps Londoners would have been called Bowies? Just a thought.

Who will buy?

Just as the bells have long marked the passage of time in London, the cries of its street vendors have narrated the daily life of its people.

In the 1968 film of the musical Oliver!, our young protagonist leans out of an open window to enjoy the harmonious cries of London - the costermongers each with their own tune, led by a rosy cheeked woman inquiring “who will buy my sweet red roses, two blooms for a penny.” Lionel Bart, a renowned songwriter of the sixties famously dubbed the King of Denmark Street, remained faithful to the significance and musicality of London’s street cries. They became an integral part of London’s identity.

Imagine young Molly, a costermonger in the 1850s. Every morning, her voice rings out through the early morning fog as she sells fresh fish. She wears a simple, faded dress of sturdy cotton, patched in several places but always clean. Over it, she has an apron with deep pockets, filled with small change, scraps of paper, and bits of string—tools of her trade. Her hands are rough and calloused from working in the chilly morning air, but they are also quick and nimble, capable of deftly wrapping fish in old newspaper or counting out coins with impressive speed. Hers is a hard life, but she carries herself with an air of confidence and cheerfulness, walking with a purposeful stride, her voice ringing out: 'Ni-ew mackerel, 6 a shilling!' she'd call, her voice carrying a melody learned from her mother, who had walked these same streets years before.

Writing in the 1850s, Henry Mayhew describes how the cries of the costermongers were 'uttered in a sort of cadence,' citing examples like ‘Place alive, alive, cheap,’ and ‘Wild Hampshire rabbits, 2 a shilling’, each with their own distinct musical intonation and rhythm. The melodic cries of costermongers were not just calls to buy; they were early forms of branding and marketing, much like today's advertising jingles. Just as street vendors developed catchy phrases to attract customers, today’s marketers use memorable slogans and tunes to capture consumer attention. The essence of these street cries lives on in the marketing strategies of brands that aim to create earworms—those catchy pieces of music or phrases that stick in your mind, whether you want them to or not.

Lionel Bart was not over romanticising the costers who often would extend their cries into songs that had a recognisable hook that was repetitive and attention-grabbing. While a repeated chorus was a feature of a few folk songs, the idea of a hook designed to be a tenacious earworm was novel, and remains the foundation of commercial songwriting.

Hooks sell. It was claimed in a letter published by The Spectator in 1711 that “people know the wares they deal in rather by their tunes than by their words”. These tunes often had musical and indeed theatrical ambitions that went far beyond a simple product announcement. They could describe the unique qualities and competitive advantages of their wares and include some humour and satire in the song. As such they were street performers with their own unique acts. A coster’s cry was clearly a commercial asset, often passed to the next generation, and sometimes borrowed for more serious minded music.

In 1764, eight-year-old Wolfgang Mozart sat at his desk in a small room on Frith Street, his quill poised above a sheet of music. The cacophony of street cries filtered through the open window—the rhythmic chant of a fishmonger, the melodic call of a flower seller. As he listened, a smile crept across his face. These sounds, so full of life and vibrancy, wove their way into his compositions, each note capturing the essence of the bustling streets below. “Hints of his very best songs,” Handel would later say, “have several of them being owing to the sounds in his ears of cries in the street.” This interplay between the city's sounds and its music continues today, with modern artists drawing inspiration from the urban soundscape just as Mozart did.

While ‘Molly’ paints a lively and resilient soundscape of commerce, and Mozart transforms elements of this soundscape into ‘high’ culture, the harsh reality of life on the streets in this part of London is best captured by the story of the musical shrimp man.

The musical shrimp man

“Old Jack Norris, the musical shrimp and the cadging ramble…” So begins The Liberty of Norton Folgate by Madness, a song that concludes their album of the same name celebrating London and the joy of living in it today. How much joy Old Jack got is another matter.

Facing St Giles church is the vibrant orange, green, and yellow frontage of Central St Giles, an office development recently purchased by Google for £730 million. Along with Google, it is home to media companies, restaurants, and those who can afford its apartments. It was built on the site of the St Giles rookery which during the 18th and 19th centuries was one of the worst slums in Britain. This is how Charles Dickens described it:

“The filthy and miserable appearance of this part of London can hardly be imagined by those (and there are many such) who have not witnessed it. Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper: every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three… Men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.”

Amidst this chaos lived Old Jack Norris, a fixture in the streets, known to all for his distinctive cry: “Fresh shrimps! Fresh shrimps!” His voice, once robust and full of life, now cracked with age and hardship, yet it still carried through the din of the rookery. For fifty years, Jack’s presence had been a constant. Jack was more than just a peddler of shrimps; he was a storyteller, a trickster, and a survivor. An 1824 account paints him as “the father or veteran chief of the votaries of ‘low life’ in St. Giles… his advice on the subject of 'cadging' (begging) was considered of the first order: no man could in finer style than he evade the clauses of the Vagrant Act, and none in his day, when he could work, could make a more profitable harvest of a cadging ramble, in his profession of shrimp-dealer”. His life was a tapestry of eccentric trickery and relentless perseverance, each day a new chapter in his ongoing struggle against the oppressive conditions of the rookery.

As his health deteriorated, Jack's world grew smaller. No longer able to roam the streets, he remained confined to his squalid room, the walls closing in on him as the life of the rookery continued outside. When he finally passed away, the coroner's verdict was stark and unfeeling: he had “Died by the Visitation of God." In truth, Jack had simply starved to death.

The rookery was a brutal place, stripping away the humanity of those who lived within its confines. Yet it also provided a perverse form of sanctuary, a place where society’s outcasts could lose themselves amidst the chaos, such as the ‘blackbirds of St Giles’ - escaped black servants and slaves who sought their liberty there. Historian Peter Ackroyd argues that out of this wretchedness and squalor, London’s creatives have imagined “a theatrical and symbolic London which has on many occasions supplanted the ‘reality’ of various areas”. Lionel Bart is a case in point. So is Suggs.

A grim spectacle

While the rookeries of St Giles were places of unimaginable hardship, they also set the stage for London's most macabre entertainments: public executions. These spectacles, much like the cries of the costermongers, were integral to the city's soundscape.

The violence that the dispossessed of London visited on each other, was nothing compared to the violence that Crown, Church, and State inflicted on Londoners, rich in a well orchestrated theatrical symbolism. By the late Georgian period there were over 200 capital offences which ranged from treason and murder to stealing a handkerchief. Henry VIII’s Buggery Act also ensured that love between two men in private was a hanging offence.

There is no accurate record for all the public executions that took place in the 700 years up to 1848, when they continued behind closed doors. But we know at numerous sites across London, people were invited to watch the hangings, boilings, beheadings and burnings of tens of thousands of people. They only stopped being done in public because the sense of fun they created jarred with Victorian sensibilities. But their legacy lives on in our popular culture. The same morbid curiosity that drew Londoners to the gallows now fuels the popularity of crime dramas, true crime podcasts, and televised trials. This enduring fascination with the darker aspects of human nature reflects a persistent desire for dramatic and emotionally charged narratives. In terms of popular entertainment, nothing beat a good hanging, and in medieval London, standing on what is now the corner of Flitcroft Street and Denmark Street put you right in the mosh pit.

The church of St Giles in the Fields has its origins as the chapel for a leper hospital founded in the twelfth century. Some time in the early fifteenth century London’s chief site for public hangings was established on the very spot where we’re standing, and a gallows set up. It became the custom of the hospital to provide the condemned prisoner with a final drink of ale served in what became known as the St Giles Bowl. Even when St Giles was superseded by the superior ‘triple gallows’ at Tyburn (Marble Arch) with far more room for the considerable crowds that turned out for a hanging, the St Giles Bowl ritual continued.

Public executions were grim and unsettling spectacles, yet they held a macabre fascination for the public, turning them into a form of entertainment. Picture the grim procession from Newgate Prison (where the Old Bailey now stands) to Tyburn. The condemned man would be walked with heavy chains clanking at his ankles, through streets crowded with onlookers, their faces a mix of morbid curiosity and sorrow. Vendors shouted, selling ale and roasted chestnuts, while children perched on their parents' shoulders for a better view. St Giles was a popular gathering point for the crowd as here the procession would stop for the ritual of the St Giles Bowl, before continuing along what is now Oxford Street.

The atmosphere of the crowd was rowdy and chaotic with spectators of all social classes present. The costers would be out in force selling food and drink to the crowd while the sound of singing would cut through the general noise and clamour. Ballad-mongers would be singing their execution ballads and selling printed copies to the spectators.

Oh the shark, babe

Execution ballads were popular and provided souvenir merch. Words were written to well known tunes, such as Greensleeves, that described the heinous crimes for which a hanging was clearly deserved. Whether or not this description had any basis in the truth was not really the point of the song. The point was to sell copies in the form of a broadside ballad - a sheet of cheap paper, printed with the words and perhaps a woodcut illustration on one side for a halfpenny or a penny. The Seven Dials district just to the south of St Giles was where many of these were printed.

The ballads themselves were designed to be accessible, appealing to both the literate and illiterate, following a consistent structure. They introduced the criminal and their crimes, dwelling on their sensational and lurid aspects. The story would continue to describe their capture, trial, and imprisonment, often focusing on the dramatic moments leading up to the execution. The ballad reached its climax with a vivid depiction of the hanging - which obviously was written some time before it actually took place.

Execution ballads were the pop songs of their time—accessible and memorable, designed with catchy hooks to convey the drama of the executions. In an age of illiteracy and the absence of a mass media, they also served as news, spreading tales of crime, punishment and retribution. As sources of news that played fast and loose with the truth, they clearly laid the foundations for today’s tabloid journalism.

When he was hanged at the age of twenty-two in 1724, Jack Sheppard attracted a crowd of 200,000 to his execution—one third of London's population at the time. He was a burglar, thief, pickpocket and occasional highwayman - and not a particularly good one as he was continually caught and incarcerated. But the skills he lacked as a thief who could evade justice he more than made up for as a gaol-breaker. The former apprentice carpenter was arrested and imprisoned on five occasions, successfully escaping on four of them.

His most audacious escape was from the top floor of St Giles Roundhouse gaol, the site of which is somewhere under the nearby Google offices. Within three hours of his imprisonment in leg irons he had broken through the wooden ceiling and lowered himself to the ground with a rope made of bedsheets. Hearing of the breakout a crowd had gathered outside, which he joined. Still in his leg irons he caused a diversion by pointing and shouting that he could see the escapee making their way over the rooftops, after which he melted into the night.

Sheppard was the original ‘Jack the Lad’, securing fame that was second only to King George. Countless execution ballads and broadsheets were devoted to him and stage plays were produced dramatising his exploits. The most significant of these from 1728 is The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay whose character Macheath was inspired by Jack Sheppard. Two centuries later Brecht and Weil adapted Gay’s work to create The Threepenny Opera. So Jack Sheppard is also the original Mack the Knife.

In the dark, we glow

We began by suggesting that the noise and ways of life that create that noise is the audible landscape upon which London’s music is built. This dynamic interplay of sound, culture, and history is not just a relic of the past but a living, evolving force. From the melodic cries of costermongers to the powerful verses of modern rap artists, London’s aural tapestry continues to shape its identity and resonate with the rhythms of life, past and present.

Executions created the city’s first mass public entertainments and collective experiences, the theatricality of which was enhanced by the art of the ballad-mongers. Sharp, accessible, dramatic, full of hooks - the execution ballad was an early form of commercial songwriting. But as this art form entered the Age of Enlightenment which produced a revival of satire, so John Gay produced his ‘ballad opera’ inspired by Jack Sheppard.

The Beggar’s Opera was execution ballad as concept album, ostensibly about criminality, but commenting mainly on the corruption of the governing class. It introduced a more accessible form of musical theatre that appealed to a far wider audience than formal opera. Its use of satire and social commentary to critique topical issues influenced both Gilbert and Sullivan and Brecht and Weil. As such Gay’s ‘opera’ lay the foundations for the modern musical.

And to the rookeries: the poverty, degradation and neglect that so many people endured because of the city’s stark inequities. The rookeries may be long gone, but poverty, degradation and neglect remain and these have had a profound influence on London’s popular music. The struggles and experiences of its communities have been reflected and expressed through song, providing a means to voice anger and aspiration. Being London, they’ve often been voiced with a fair degree of volume.

London has given us punk, UK garage, drum and bass, grime, and dubstep. From The Clash to Little Simz, Kae Tempest to Stormzy, London’s artists have channelled their frustrations, disillusionment, and anger into powerful musical energy and social commentary. Venting anger is but a small part of the beauty and brilliance that characterises London’s music. There is a resilience and hope that permeates the city's popular songs, reflecting a sense of determination, solidarity, and belief in the possibility of change. Above all, through the challenges and frustrations, the inequity and injustices, London’s music exudes an overwhelming sense of pride in the communities that people are part of.

On these streets, these streets

In the dark, we glow

My Hood • Ray BLK

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Thanks

Thanks to the tutor and fellow students on the City Lit Creative Non-Fiction Workshopping course. Their comments and inspiration helped to improve a far less inspired earlier draft. It perhaps still tells more than it shows, but hopefully is far better at using ‘imagination to fill the gaps’ around my research. The journeys they shared into dreamworlds, down rivers, into Calabrian farmhouses, and behind family photographs were a joy.