This is my hat. Reading is free. Paying is optional. But if this work means something to you, throwing something in keeps it going — and unlocks "Closing My Tabs", the research supporting my book, and rabbit holes behind this newsletter.
Quick note before we begin: the Asheville Buskerfest is accepting applications for its inaugural year. The festival will be spread across multiple stages around the city. Here’s the link to apply.
In March I read an urbanism book (Jan Gehl’s Life Between Buildings, a great book that I’ve already mentioned here and here) that explains why some open spaces work and others fail.
According to Jan, the liveliest parts of plazas are their “edge zones”. That’s where you find the biggest foot flow, the most activities to do and the best chances to strike up conversations with strangers. These edges are vital when it comes to the success of a plaza as a place where people come to hang out.
After reading that, I put the book down to look at photos of the plaza I know best. Trafalgar Square is London’s most iconic plaza and, sure enough, it has edge zones everywhere: hundreds of metres of wall low enough to sit on (especially around its two huge fountains), concrete benches along the taller walls, and steps leading up to the North Terrace, where there are more walls, seats and bollards. As you can see in this image, that’s exactly where people congregate:
Source: TinEye says hundreds of people have used this image online, but I can’t find the original source. So I does that make it free to use?
Surrounding the Square, busy roads carry the constant din of Central London traffic: buses, taxis and revving motorbike couriers. Those roads are lined with trees, helping to dampen the sound the traffic makes before it hits neighbouring buildings.
This makes Trafalgar Square the ideal busking pitch: visitors are tourists with money and time to spare; the plaza’s layout funnels people along invisible channels next to where buskers can perform; there’s ample space for people to walk around large audiences without getting annoyed; and the whole area sits within a sound bubble. It’s as if the place was custom built to be used by buskers — which is why so many incredible performers have made it their office for decades.
On a whim, I decided to see whether Trafalgar Square’s Wikipedia page mentioned its considerable busking ecosystem. What I found was worse than nothing.
As you can see from the image below, when street shows are happening in Trafalgar Square (which is much of the time), they are the most popular activity in the square:
Photo courtesy of Foster and Partners, who were behind the redesign of the Plaza in the 1990s.
And yet, to find “busking” on the Wikipedia page, I had to scroll to the bottom of the page, to a section titled “Events”, then down to the sub-heading “Other uses”, in which busking is only the focus of its third and last paragraph — below the pigeons, below the temporary Christmas and New Years celebrations, and below a handful of sporting celebrations:
Worse still, the entire history of busking in Trafalgar Square — the hundreds of millions of people who’ve been entertained there over the last half century, the celebrities who started their careers there, the vibrancy, joy and innovation of the art created there — was boiled down into just three sentences, the first of which was this one:
The square has seen controversy over busking and street theatre, which have attracted complaints over noise and public safety.[122]
This is completely wrong. Footnote 122 takes you to this article, which does not say that Trafalgar Square buskers create noise or public safety concerns.
In fact, I know this is nonsense because in 2023 I did some research that showed that the busking scene there is incredibly uncontroversial.
Trafalgar Square received just 14 complaints about street performers per year over a period of 3 years, during which time there were often several buskers performing simultaneously, entertaining annual audiences in the millions. Each complaint represented hundreds of thousands of entertained people, a complaints rate so small it basically doesn’t exist — and is far lower than London’s other busking hotspots:
In 2012 the Greater London Authority created a bylaw for regulating busking and associated tourism.[123][124]
This second sentence is true, but the person who wrote it only put it there so that they could link to their own book in footnote 123 (self-promotion is frowned upon by the Wikipedia community, and is why I’ve never made a page about busk.co). As for GLA’s 2012 bylaws, they did say that written permission was required to busk in Trafalgar Square, but I don’t think that rule was ever enforced — or if it was, it was only done so sparingly.
The National Gallery. Wayland Smith / CC BY-SA 2.0
In 2016 the National Gallery proposed to introduce licensing for such performances[125]
This final sentence is also true, but equally irrelevant, as the people who made the proposal were ignored. Also, it doesn’t tell the full story.
For a brief moment in 2016, the National Gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, and its chair, the banking dynasty heir Hannah Rothschild, forgot the scope of their work. The National Gallery’s remit is to display dead people’s art in a stone-lined mausoleum. And yet, at a public event Gabriele and Hannah spoke of their desire to kill the art taking place outside — presumably because it was being produced for the living, by the living.
What would they replace buskers with? Well, Hannah said, “The space could be one of London’s great parks. You can set the hare running on that.” That idiom means to spark a debate. However, it comes from the act of flushing a hare from cover so the dogs can chase it down — the brutal murder of a cute, living thing to celebrate death. Indeed.
Let’s edit Wikipedia together
The only thing you'd have learned from reading Trafalgar Square’s Wikipedia page was that busking was unwanted and that an art critic and a bloodthirsty nepo baby failed to get it banned.
But I looked at the history of the edits on that page, and it appeared that the Wiki’s busking content was written by a single person. And if a single person can determine everything Wikipedia knows about busking in an area, then that person could be me. So that’s what I did. If you go there now, you’ll see my edits:
One of the projects I'll propose to the Busking Advocacy Committee is an audit of how busking is represented on Wikipedia — and then fixing it. We are a loose collection of advocates who want to make it easier for buskers to argue their case. As I see it, changing the narrative about street performance could be part of that, and editing the world’s encyclopaedia to properly portray the world of busking is just one way we could start.
If you want to be part of the committee, email me at [email protected] with a reason why you want to join the group and any relevant experience.
The world's encyclopaedia deserves better. So do the people who fill our public spaces with something worth writing about.
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