Whatever happened to peace and quiet? The search for stillness in a world of noise

Does life need a perpetual soundtrack? Andy Martin says it’s time to revive the sound of silence

(Illustrations by Isobel Orton)

I’m sitting in my local library, in Church Street, London. Trying to concentrate, the way you do. There are people reading and writing, and taking books off shelves, and reading the newspaper. There are also two people, one man and one woman, making telephone calls. I imagine it’s a WhatsApp call or Skype, via the library’s decent wifi setup. The guy is keeping his voice down a bit (some kind of business deal), the woman, if anything, is speaking louder than normal. She is upset. Something about how she has thrown her partner out of the house for excessive drinking or something. Either way, it’s a sad tale.

But what I really want to know is this: whatever happened to those signs in libraries that said, “SILENCE PLEASE”, or “SILENCE MEANS SILENCE”? When did libraries become silence-free zones? The telephone callers come in here specifically to shoot the breeze. The library has become a mecca for mobile phone users who can’t get a decent signal in the street.

I was recently on a train journey from London to Bristol. An hour or two. I had reserved a seat in the “Quiet Carriage”. A train is not a library (although that’s not a bad idea). But it seems reasonable to have at least one compartment dedicated to people who want to keep it down for a while. There are polite notices (that not everybody reads) asking passengers to refrain from (as per the library) making telephone calls. But what about loud conversations? Is there a protocol about that? Two women, sitting opposite one another, keep up their dialogue, punctuated by laughter, all the way to Bristol. Maybe they really are old friends who haven’t seen one another for years. But I get the feeling that, overt content aside, everything they say is a protest, a revolt against oppressive peace and quiet.