Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

 

View from Soho

Noise!

Londoners are famously parochial. What were once actual villages are still precisely that to their residents, who know the exact boundaries of their home patch – although not everyone carries it as far as some of my old Soho-born neighbours, who worried that there were very funny people North of Oxford Street.

A friend who lives in Hammersmith got utterly lost recently, when he emerged from Tottenham Court Road Tube Station, while I sat nervous and goggling throughout a taxi journey home from uncharted reaches beyond Millbank, feeling when at last I saw buildings I recognised – the Houses of Parliament – as though I'd just got through an Arab/Israeli border crossing.

So it's incredible that whether Londoners live on the heights of Hampstead or the banks of the Thames , whether their income slots them into Belgravia or Balham, they can all be subject to an identical misery.

According to statistics, the greatest number of complaints reported London-wide concerns a single problem. Not pollution, violence, theft, delays or breakdowns on public transport, nor even road works. No matter what your post code, it can reach into your home and get you, and its name is Noise.

Noise interrupts and prevents people's sleep, affects their efficiency and their moods, and makes them despair – it's as destructive as chronic illness (which it can create), a bad relationship or unemployment. Yet availing yourself of the legislation currently provided if you are a sufferer will all too likely reveal that you have no adequate protection against it, or redress against those perpetrating it. This is one of those miseries where the law sucks its teeth and leaves you at the mercy of luck.

It may originate indoors (and this can be by far the worst kind) or out, (where it's more generally obvious) and because the latter's so blatant, I'm going to work from the outside in.

Living where I do, I'm commonly asked whether it's very noisy, but those who ask rarely have any idea what sort of noise is an issue. Soho – their imagination starts and stops with nightclubs, and they're amazed if your response is a bitter laugh.

Let's begin with an endemic, all weekday round situation. Ever since the smoking ban, hordes of drinkers have stood in the streets outside pubs all over London , rain or shine, heat wave or just about anything but snow, barbecuing their lungs while they destroy their livers. It was no time before they were joined by their friends and colleagues, and smokers or not they ignored the comfortable indoor seating and when they grew tired of leaning on walls or perching on heels preferred to sit on the pavement even before they got drunk. Barring blizzards, nobody sits inside now – they're all outside talking to each other. Sounds OK? Sounds chummy? But they're not talking, they're shrieking! They've cranked up the volume to rookery level, so you can hear every syllable a block away and fifteen storeys up in the air. Hacking their emails? Don't be silly. You can know every detail of their personal lives with every window in your home shut!

I'm surrounded by pubs and wine bars, all of which have customers who swell in numbers as the day passes till they spread right across the streets from one side to the other, and whose customers all compete to be heard. And do you want to know the worst news about this little habit? The noise can be baffled by buildings at ground level, but when you're higher up and there's nothing but air between you and the screeching throng, they're louder in your bedroom than down in the street!

So that's the background – the first layer. You acclimatise to it. It's there every weekday, with the crescendo on Friday when offices close for the weekend and the revellers bawl their smoked lungs out till they eventually break up, still screaming, and leave you limp and only beginning to recover by the time the crowds start to gather all over again on Monday.

But the next layer, being erratic, is a shock every time. For people just browsing around the West End , it's entertainment. For those of us who live here, it isn't. Passers-by may not be able to stand those weirdos who paint themselves silver and pretend to be statues, (and I'm not that keen either) but at least they're silent. Bands aren't.

And bands are, beyond belief, sudden. Pop up could have been invented to describe them. They aren't there, and then they are, having leapt out of the back of a van. They're capable of setting up a roped-off space and amplifiers within two minutes, and from then on you get their repertoire on a loop for hour after hour. If you're lucky they won't have permission, and the Noise Team can invite them to pack everything back in their wagon and move on. But the vital words are if you're lucky.

First, they may have permission for an event, no matter how ear-splitting, or for how many hours' duration. People strolling along Carnaby Street can stop and only listen until they've had enough, but residents are trapped within yards of a noise level that would drown out Glastonbury . Second, because they're so mobile, someone from the Noise Team may telephone you and say they can't find them. “Can't you hear them?” you may cry, and yes, they can, but …

One of the most revealing conversations I've had with a member of the Noise Team, who couldn't seem to locate anything, was when she finally revealed that she didn't even have an A to Z. I drew a complete blank when I mentioned a satnav. All she had were a few photocopied pages of a map of the area, and (as she said plaintively) the streets were so small on it she couldn't read the names.

For your information, let me just take you quickly through the procedure of dealing with our local Noise Team. It's fairly standard. You telephone Westminster City Council, and they put you through to the appropriate office. Somebody goes through the details (and this may take a while, particularly if the noise outside is so loud they can't hear you on the other end of the line) and you're promised you'll be 'phoned back within forty minutes. This may prove true, or it may not, depending on the volume of calls they're getting. Then you have to explain the whole problem again to the person who rings you, and who is actually out and about. They may be out and about anywhere in Westminster, ages away or around the corner, they may be stuck in traffic, they may be wonderfully kind and helpful, they may be fed up and hate everybody. It's a matter of luck.

So is their locating the noise and dealing with it. There's no limit to the number of hours this can take. One helpful woman finally found a van full of instruments, amplifiers and musicians tucked in an alley. I believe the technical term for what they were doing is hiding.

But not all members of the Team are as dedicated as she was. Another individual took until the small hours of a morning to deal with the fact that a crane was knocking alarming loads against the windows of our fifteen storey block on their way to a development – a terrifying activity which, if allowed at all, should have ceased in the previous early evening. Mind you, our block is in a cul de sac, the name of which was probably printed in small letters on her photocopies!

Cranes are, currently, a constant in London . As are pneumatic drills excavating the road surface and pavements, scaffolding being put up and torn down, pile drivers at work on foundations – and all these are as common within yards of Harrods as they are within yards of Soho Square . But of course all noisy work is banned before 8.00 a.m. and after 6.00 p.m. on weekdays, after midday on Saturdays, and barred completely on Sundays. Oh, there goes my bitter laughter again. There's the regular waste disposal lorry roaring outside my windows this evening, as it chews up the usual percussion section.

Another joy – at dawn on weekends I (and everybody else) can look forward to being shaken awake by yet another mechanical torment. It's the howling thrum of a tanker, from which water is forced up storeys of metal rods to freshen the window boxes above every business around us. And this work is done by contractors working for Westminster City Council! The people who make the rules! As I pointed out to the Noise Team, while I held my head one grey early morning, by the time any official turned up all that would be left were wet pavements, but what the blankety blank Hell did those contractors think they were doing? The Noise Team didn't know.

And in case you think I'm a picky fusspot, let me tell you I lived through the years when an old generating station across the road was demolished, layer after layer of cement and brickwork were bulldozed out, ever deeper, till a plague pit and a river were discovered, and innumerable pneumatic drills and pile drivers worked on concrete over an area the size of a city block for more than ten hours a day, at least six days a week. It went on so long people for streets around got tinnitus and hearing problems and just about everybody I knew was chewing Valium like Smarties. Petitions achieved nothing – anything to do with utilities and public works seems to be licensed to ignore all restrictions – and when the new station eventually went up we were all too catatonic to celebrate the relief.

Yet, bad as noise that slams into your home from the outside may be, it is as nothing to noise that stems from close inside with you. And the inside kind is immeasurably harder to police.

The sound of someone else's television is irritating, especially if it's so loud you can't hear your own, and it's funny how it's always tuned to the sort of stuff you'd only choose at gun point. I have endured Formula One booming through my ceiling while Bruce Willis erupted from my carpet, and believe me it's no fun being the jam in that sandwich, particularly when you were looking forward to a nice quiet re-run of Prime Suspect or Morse.

But while other people's viewing has been able to disturb their neighbours from the time TVs first stood in a hallowed corner of the nation's living rooms, what sent suffering and complaints soaring was a change in domestic interiors that only occurred in recent decades. A skip is recognised everywhere now as the only acceptable place for fitted carpets, but their removal has wrecked as many lives as the credit crunch.

If you live in a house and have wood floors, good luck to you. They can look lovely and no-one will turn up their nose at your taste. If you're semi-detached your next-door neighbour will hear you pounding up and down your staircase as never before, but what's the matter with that? Well …. A friend of mine who lived in a quiet drive in North London was nearly driven out of her mind from the moment new people next door went for the stripped look, and her story is an all too familiar one.

Down in South London , other friends lived happily in the bottom half of an old house. Above them lived a delightful woman, whom they often helped with errands. But this congenial set-up was destroyed when the neighbour upstairs grew frail, went to live with her family, and was replaced by a crowd of flat-sharing friends. Of course they ripped out the carpets, but they also went in for band practice and parties.

My friends spent nearly a year sleeping in their garage – the only place even remotely quiet – and a fortune on the installation of suspended ceilings. The ceilings didn't totally solve the problem, as the wife wept to me down the 'phone, but it had been so cold in the garage!

Before the garage and all the expense, this poor couple (the wife's a nurse and the husband's a medical researcher) had naturally approached their new upstairs neighbours and asked if they could possibly be a little quieter. And just as naturally been told to bog off: I have yet to hear of a noise-maker responding helpfully, no matter how polite the request.

But I have heard a Hell of a lot about suspended ceilings. I can't seem to get in a taxi without the cab driver telling me he's had to have them installed for his Mum or someone else in his family, and I'm beginning to wonder whether the companies who supply them are paying the “strip out your carpets” style gurus to keep up the pressure.

It's hard not to wail at a noisy conspiracy, for if you live in a block of flats built in the speedy days of concrete panels and no sound-proofing (as I, and many others, do in central London) and somebody upstairs lays laminate flooring above you, you can find yourself in the deepest circle of Hell.

It was bad enough while the flat above mine was torn to pieces. Cast iron radiators were drilled out, the kitchen and bathroom remodelled, and I was flooded so often I kept checking for mould. But when all that was over my problems were only beginning. Laminate flooring had been laid overhead and in moved a couple who had a rich nocturnal life, never took their shoes off, and sounded as though they were running a flamenco-dance studio. The bags under my eyes touching my bent knees, I went and asked them if they could possibly put a rug down, even if it was just in the bedroom. The response was immediate – why should they spend that kind of money? And there was an escalation in the stamping of Jimmy Choo-shod feet.

An acquaintance in Covent Garden had the same problem, but in her block the heels upstairs belonged to a drag artist who came home after his night club act and unwound by tramping about for the rest of the bleary hours in heels that were just as high and at least size eleven. When the seventy-year-old sufferer knocked timidly on his door, she was confronted by a man built like Rocky, whose response to her whimper about the stamping was And???

Sometimes people try to fight back. A girl I know, who sublet her own flat when she moved in with her boy friend, got a frenzied call after the people one storey higher took out their fitted carpet. By the time she went to see her tenants they had got to the “banging on the ceiling with a broom handle” stage. All this ever gets you, as I could have told them, is damage to your own home but no change in the behaviour of the uncaring bastards upstairs.

So what in Heaven's name can you do? Call out the Noise Team? If what the people upstairs are doing can be classified as normal behaviour (despite taking place in high heels at all hours on laminate flooring), the fact that they're keeping you awake all night is completely within the law. I don't really know what constitutes abnormal behaviour – the addition of tambourines???

Deafening TV or music? Yes, the Noise Team can request the perpetrators to turn it down. But not if it's just annoying – it really has to be so loud you can't hear your own TV or music. And when they go away it'll be turned up again. There's also the typical now you hear them, now you don't element: officials will finally arrive just when there's a break in the racket. They leave, you fall back in bed – and it'll start all over again. Even if the noise-makers have been caught, nothing much will have been achieved and you'll have had another wrecked, sleepless night.

One of my closest friendships was formed with a neighbour when we were both buying earplugs in the local chemist's. I've come to accept that I have to take them to bed with me, the way some people take a good book or a glass of hot milk. But I don't like having to wear them the whole time, which for long periods was an inconvenient necessity.

Wood-style flooring has been recognised as such a potential cause of misery that Westminster City Council have actually issued a leaflet about it, warning that a soundproof underlay is desirable, and that if noise nuisance is proved as a result of this type of floor, anyone who has installed it may be forced to have it removed. But getting proof is a long-winded and frustrating procedure, with all the work on the shoulders of sufferers who are already sleep-deprived and in many cases intimidated. And I have yet to hear of anyone achieving a longed-for removal of the stuff that creates the flamenco-dance studio syndrome.

The situation does vary according to terms of lease, tenancy, etc. Someone who wrote to the Home & Property section of the Evening Standard this year, about being driven insane by the high heels of the girl living above her, got an incredibly confident answer. There was likely to be a lessee's covenant, the printed response stated, that provided for the floors of flats to be carpeted, and the high-heeled girl upstairs could have this mentioned to her, or the managing agents could be contacted.

Good luck with that, I thought. I contacted the management of my building about the leaseholders who lived in heels on laminate above me, and got precisely nowhere.

What you have to hope and pray for are sensible, congenial neighbours, and managing agents with sense. Two developers who bought flats in my building improved them and then ignored fashion and laid fitted carpets before letting – as one of them said to me, In this kind of structure, carpets are the only answer, if you don't want to drive the neighbours mad.

I wasn't rescued from an unendurable situation until the people above me moved out and somebody else moved in – and I've lived in terror of my new upstairs neighbour leaving ever since, because going back to the way things used to be would see me in an asylum or a sky dive off my balcony.

Blogs, newspaper articles and letters columns, and 'phone calls and emails all attest to capital-wide suffering. A Councillor told me that the local Noise Team was better than nothing, but hopelessly overstretched, and without really tough legislation how will any of us, living in our earplugs, halt the onward march of the high-heeled surround-sound devotees on their bare floors?

We can only live in hope of a backlash, and meanwhile there are pockets of resistance that make the news. I know of a block of flats in Bloomsbury where radio and television are forbidden after 11.00 p.m. , and another block, near Wimbledon Common, has banned all noise between 11.00 p.m. and 9.00 a.m. , and that includes not only radio, TV and all music, but even singing or whistling in the shower!

The price of a leasehold flat in the Wimbledon block may be breathtaking, but I wouldn't mind betting the fight for a home there is a law-abiding version of the Tottenham riots. Too many of us are fed to the gritted teeth with deafening days and sleepless nights. Londoners may have been able to “take it” during the Blitz, but they've had enough of taking it now. Roll on the anti-noise controllers, and if I'm lucky enough to find that total peace has been enforced at last in the flats where I live, I'll let you know instantly! That's if I'm not buried under the avalanche of desperate Londoners, whose cries and protests are heard from every part of the capital, all trying to get in here with me!

© Alida Baxter

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