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.
Now is the time to take back our streets | The Times
Emma Duncan Saturday July 04 2020
