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Together with crowds and traffic noise is the other thing we are meant to mind. Of course it depends what kind of noise. We think fondly of the supposed sounds of eighteenth century London (we probably have in mind one of those tablemats with engravings by Morland : The Cries of Old London perhaps; "Buy my Sweet Lavender"etc.) Or if we think of the London of Dickens or Conan Doyle then city noise, almost exclusively (if it is left to the TV costume drama producers) is limited to the clipclop of horses hooves and the rumble of wheels on cobble.

We probably like to think of the past, any past, as necessarily quieter than our own; city film from the sixties, even the seventies, is beginning to have a retro charm; traffic was sparser, quieter; (good God, we see parking spaces!) I remember seeing a sixties film in which the hero repeatedly parked his car just in front of South Kensington tube station, each time to greater laughter from the 1990s audience.) But it didn't seem quiet at the time then. OK so let's go right back, say, to the 1930s; surely London was more peaceful then? not according to DH Lawrence, writing in 1930:

"The traffic is too heavy! ….Twenty years ago London was to me thrilling, thrilling, thrilling, the vast and roaring heart of all adventure.....but now the adventure is crushed out of London….The traffic of London used to roar with the mystery of man's adventure on the seas of life, like a vast sea-shell, murmuring a thrilling, half-comprehensible story. Now it booms…" (sorry, there's a bit more; this is Lawrence after all) "like monotonous, far-off guns, in a monotony of crushing something, crushing the earth, crushing out life, crushing everything dead."

"Twenty years ago"; that takes us back to 1910; so let us rewind to then; only to find Symons complaining: about his present, wanting to go back to his past

"Noise and evil smells have filled the streets like tunnels in daylight; it is a pain to walk in the midst of these hurrying and clattering machines....London" (here comes the nostalgic bit) "that was vast and smoky and loud, now stinks and reverberates..."

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