On this page, for the very first time, you can listen to all of the 1928 recordings alongside recordings of those same London locations in lockdown, almost a hundred years later.
This question is really the kernel of the nut to be cracked. We have become so used to the perpetual noise around us that many of us fail to appreciate what our poor brains are being called upon to endure
Daily Mail, 6 September 1928
For almost a century, it would have been unfathomable to imagine what silent central London streets would sound like. Through the Collecting COVID project, a record of this extraordinary moment in time will be preserved for future generations.