Now is the time to take back our streets | The Times

The other evening, a friend and I took a bottle of wine and sat on a pavement a couple of streets away. There was singing, cello, violin, drums, poetry, rap and a couple of hundred people sitting around trestle tables, leaning out of balconies or standing. I enjoyed the audience as much as the performance. This being one of those streets with an early-Victorian terrace on one side and a council block on the other, the people were of every colour and class as well as shape and age. Some of them stood bolt upright; some threw themselves into it; some swayed in the slightly embarrassed way the English do when they want to respond to the music without doing anything as disinhibited as dancing.