Shout it from the rooftops: the noise pollution in towns and cities is killing us
T wo 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 citiesis 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
Read more on theguardian.com
