A pleasant half hour exploring a small pocket of the West End
A soundwalk is a guided walk exploring the intersection between location and sound. In this case, landmarks around Charing Cross are paired with orchestral music and lyrics. Starting at St. Martin in the Fields, A City Full of Stories takes participants around the hustle and bustle of London’s West End, and shows how quickly this can transition into serenity when you know the perfect side street to duck into. The resulting half hour provides a nice walk alongside a pleasing musical accompaniment.
Having been designed in collaboration with people experiencing homelessness, alongside members of the academy at St. Martin in the Fields and the Royal Academy of Music, the map takes in several key areas for the homeless in the Charing Cross area. At each new location, a track is triggered which prompts the listener to view their surroundings from a different perspective. As the walk winds on, these nudges become more explicit, focusing on the hidden lives of the people and places around you.
Initially, the soundwalk is easy to set up, downloading the free Echoes app uses your phone’s GPS to cue in the music when you reach the appropriate location. I found this quite unreliable, however, and resorted to looking at the map and manually selecting which track to play – an experience made harder by one track being out of place on the playlist (the fourth track hides at the end).
Even with this immersion broken, however, the musical backing affects the ‘feel’ of the walk more than I was expecting. Walking down Henrietta Street to a rousing score felt like it was ripped straight from cinema, even if it was disrupted by a pedicab rider blaring out Britney Spears not 30 seconds later! The walk returning to St. Martin in the Fields swells with a wonderful hopefulness that rounds out the narrative to a nice conclusion.
Many of the spoken sections focus on imagining the stories of the buildings and people around you, but this seems to fight against, rather than embellish, A City Full of Stories’ engagement with the homeless experience. This second theme is the more compelling, and it’s nice to have locations I predominantly associate with food drops and rough-sleeping recontextualised, but it would have been more effective to dwell on these ideas for the full walk rather than pivoting to consider “hidden lives” every few tracks.
Overall, if either the “sound” or the “walk” element of A City Full of Stories appeals to you, then combining them for a “soundwalk” does make them feel more special. The result is a pleasant way to kill half an hour in the West End, if nothing else.
A City Full of Stories is free to complete, via the Echoes App, and more details can be found here. NOTE: Completing the walk before 5:30pm gives a more scenic walk through St Paul’s Churchyard.