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In June, Time Out ran a story titled ‘This is their way of phasing us out’: inside the busking battle in central London, by Amy Houghton.
Here’s how it starts:
It’s a glaring hot afternoon and noise permeates Soho: shrieks of kids on school trips, ’80s anthems blaring from pedicab speakers, the clumsy honks and growling engines of passing traffic.
Turn the corner into Trafalgar Square and you’re met with the sounds of amplified guitar strums and the sight of a growing crowd of couples tapping their feet, toddlers bobbing their knees and teenagers clapping their hands in time to a rendition of Coldplay’s ‘Viva la Vida’. Busker Johan Satre has them in a gleeful trance.
It’s quite brilliant. Sure, she’s telling her readers, you might not like the song Viva la Vida, but it’s far less bad than blaring pedicabs or growling engines—which we don’t tend to complain about.
Next, Amy goes through a little busking and legislative history, before getting to the point: busking has been banned in Leicester Square due to a lawsuit by local businesses.
The rest of the story focuses on “the buskers’ side of the story.”
This is unusual. Normally, articles about busking legislation fail to include the voices of a single busker. In fact, as far as I can remember this is the only time a major publication has run a story (almost) entirely focusing on the buskers’s point of view.
So, let’s look at those stories.
Busker 1: Harry Marshall
Harry is “visibly despondent”. He’d been a professional busker for seven years, but the licence limited all the buskers in Central London to just two amplified pitches. Decades-long entertainers were forced to quit their careers. If Harry abided by the rules he’d not be able to pay rent. So, he stopped trying. This resulted in criminal convictions for busking illegally.
Busker 2: Elliott Herrington
Elliott started busking on Tottenham Court Road in 2019. His application for a licence was rejected because he’d been performing already without a licence. So, once the council started taking legal action against buskers, and unable to get a licence himself, he was forced out of Westminster.
Busker 3: Shanilee Tordilla
Confirming something I predicted would happen back in 2021, Shanilee said that it was only licence holders that were harmed by the licensing system, as having a licence gave you more opportunities to be prosecuted.
Busker 4: Serena Kaos
Serena agreed, saying those who follow the rules are punished for the actions of those that don’t, a form of collective punishment that places the burden on the rule followers.
After hearing from the performers, Amy made another unusual choice: to note that buskers simply can’t be heard without amplification in Leicester Square. Instead of framing it as a choice, she notes that amplification is a fact of life in the noises parts of the noisiest borough in the noisiest city in the UK.
Then she goes on to quote the council claiming that the limitations of the licence mean that some buskers have argued, “that they must play louder to…maximise their potential earnings…[so] that the volume can be much louder than they would use normally.”
Even if it were true—and I doubt it—that multiple buskers admitted in council interviews to intentionally playing over the noise limit, the buskers’ side of the story is that the council has enacted such a restrictive system that buskers are forced to play abnormally loud in order to make rent.
The kick in the teeth (and what inspired me to write this newsletter) is that Amy then notes that a council report revealed they’d received “5,070 complaints” about buskers over 26 months, about a 1,000 complaint increase on the previous period.
In 2023 the council admitted that this figure is completely wrong. In fact, instead of increasing, there had been a decrease in complaints, down to just 2,418, less than half the figure quoted above.
But, the council never publicly corrected this number. Looked at it that way, the FOI request seems to have been a pointless exercise. The old figure stands, the new figure is ignored, and journalists have no idea it exists.
Am I wasting my time?
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Birmingham
Recently I submitted an FOI request to Birmingham City Council about their proposal to increase a blanket ban on busking in the centre of town. I’ve written about it before, but for those of you who missed my earlier newsletter, here’s what Josie Appleton said about it in Spiked Online, in an article titled The Pettiness of Birmingham’s Busking Ban:
Birmingham’s blanket ban on all non-authorised ‘noise’ is extraordinary. It treats very varied activities—from singing to bagpipe playing to juggling to preaching—as merely a form of ‘noise’, which supposedly has a ‘detrimental effect on the quality of life’ in the city.
Given that all these activities are expressly designed to appeal to the public…it is absurd for councillors to assert that busking as a whole has a ‘detrimental effect’. Busking ranges from the sublime to the cheesy. As well as variations in quality, it is also a question of taste – some people like some tunes and other people don’t. Yet, in the eyes of Birmingham City Council, everything from a concert pianist to a homeless man with his penny whistle is now just unauthorised ‘noise’.
This ban shows how councils are not dealing with specific problems as they arise, but treating all free public activities as implicitly ‘anti-social’ and better off suppressed. In effect, Birmingham City Council is assuming a monopoly over the city’s sound environment – the only amplified sound you will hear is that which has been explicitly authorised by the council.
However, the thing that’s missing from all the articles I’ve read about Birmingham’s blanket busking ban is that busking might not even be the target of the legislation.
In the past, I’ve seen cases where councils have wanted to get rid of the street preachers, but don’t want to make it look like they’re targeting religious groups, so they add the buskers into the wording of the new law in order to distract from their intent.
In every article about Birmingham’s ban (The MU, the BBC, the Manifesto Club, Equity, BirminghamLive), the council is quoted as saying legislation was needed to curb excessive noise from busking and street preaching.
So, in my Freedom of Information request I asked them to clarify how much of a problem each is (you can read the full text here):
1. Government Guidance says you’re supposed to speak to “impacted parties” before consulting over new PSPOs. Did the council reach out to buskers before the consultation?
Birmingham City Council: This is not a legal requirement, so we didn’t do it.
2. You say noise complaints have been increasing. Provide the number of complaints about buskers per year.
BCC: We don’t know.
3. What proportion of complaints were about busking VS preaching?
BCC: We don’t know. However, according to the noise diaries we asked businesses to keep, 75% were related to street performers and 23% to preaching.
4. Okay, please provide the guidance the council gave those businesses when asking them to keep a diary.
BCC: We can’t, because it was verbal guidance.
5. What proportion of buskers perform in an anti-social manner?
BCC: We don’t know. However, Birmingham’s architecture is special, meaning buskers who play at a normal level would still be annoying to locals.
6. What proportion of complaints are about amplified acts?
BCC: We don’t know exactly, but it was the vast majority.
7. What proportion of the complaints were about the buskers being too loud (i.e. over 85 dB), rather than some other reason?
BCC: We don’t know.
8. What proportion of the complaints came from businesses with open doors and windows?
BCC: We don’t know.
9. In which ways did the council try to receive positive feedback about buskers during the consultation period?
BCC: We did not.
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The council doesn’t know, then, the total number of complaints, the breakdown of the complaints or the nature of the complaints. It didn’t follow the government guidance, and only decided to record one side of the story. They also made the argument that all busking would be problematic there, amplified or not, due to the special nature of the city’s architecture.
Also, instead of asking businesses to record “all incidents where the noise was too loud”, their verbal guidance might have mentioned they want to specifically know about buskers and street preachers. This would invalidate any information recorded in the “noise diaries”, for leading the witnesses.
This makes me angry. Maybe you’re angry too. But, what’s the next step? How is it useful that we have righteous anger? Who cares? Who’ll know? And how does it change our actions going forwards?
These are honest questions I don’t have the answers to, but I’ve created a poll below for you to answer and you can always reply in the comments.
Without those answers, I’m at a bit of a loss of what to do next. I don’t like the feeling that I’m wasting everyone’s time—especially not of Birmingham Council, who just declared bankruptcy and can’t afford lawyers to answer my questions.
There’s another downside too: according to one person I spoke to who used to work in government, here’s what this FOI request has achieved: in the minds of local council members, I am now an enemy combatant.