‘Interesting cities can’t be quiet”, runs one of grime DJ and music industry thinker Elijah’s epigrams – and in its essential spirit, he is right. Silent, tidy, prim cities should be treated with suspicion. Any such atmosphere denotes that something has gone wrong at a macro level: either you’ve wound up in an authoritarian regime or, worse, Switzerland.

But not all urban sounds are created equal, and some are more unwelcome than others. Take the tide of (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) reels crashing on the shores of our collective attention on public transport, thanks to the astonishing number of grown adults who think it’s OK to surf the slopwave without headphones.

These rotters are accompanied by people taking their phone or video calls out loud on speakerphone. In the early days of mobile phones it was a widely agreed social truism that the white-collar worker unselfconsciously bellowing “I’m on the train!” into their BlackBerry was a grade-A public nuisance, plausibly worthy of throwing in the stocks. Well, at least then we were only being subjected to one end of the conversation.

The spread of 5G across the country is making such unsolicited noise more possible and more common: “loudcasting”, the BBC called it in a recent in-depth look at the phenomenon. A public backlash is suddenly mounting. Never one to miss an opportunity for free press coverage, last week Wetherspoons boss Tim Martin banned it from his pubs.

It’s funny how social pressure points like this fade in and out of........

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