Great Tom rings out for lockdown
Mar 24, 2020, 10:28 PM
Oxford lockdown sounds recorded by Cities and Memory.
"Great Tom, the bell in Tom Tower at Christ Church college, is the loudest bell in Oxford at 6.5 tons. It's still rung 101 times every night, as a tradition marking the original 100 scholars of the college plus one, at 2105 each evening. Apparently this is 9pm in "Oxford time", which always used to be five minutes later than the rest of the UK (I have no idea why!).
"So it's a highly traditional, distinctive soundmark of the city, but here we're hearing it on a remarkable day, just 30 minutes after the British Prime Minister called for a full lockdown of all citizens in the UK to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
"As you can hear from the recording, the UK has had some problems with its citizens not taking the coronavirus warnings very seriously, and going about their business pretty much as before, while the government was very slow at introducing strict measures to combat this.
"Here you can hear a queue at the kebab van across the road, multiple buses going past, a couple of joggers, a taxi idling away right in front of us for the entire recording, and other cars passing by - all this often drowns out the sound of the bells, as Oxford enjoys perhaps its last evening of vague normality for quite some time."
Part of the #StayHomeSounds project, documenting the sounds of the global coronavirus lockdown around the world - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds
"Great Tom, the bell in Tom Tower at Christ Church college, is the loudest bell in Oxford at 6.5 tons. It's still rung 101 times every night, as a tradition marking the original 100 scholars of the college plus one, at 2105 each evening. Apparently this is 9pm in "Oxford time", which always used to be five minutes later than the rest of the UK (I have no idea why!).
"So it's a highly traditional, distinctive soundmark of the city, but here we're hearing it on a remarkable day, just 30 minutes after the British Prime Minister called for a full lockdown of all citizens in the UK to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
"As you can hear from the recording, the UK has had some problems with its citizens not taking the coronavirus warnings very seriously, and going about their business pretty much as before, while the government was very slow at introducing strict measures to combat this.
"Here you can hear a queue at the kebab van across the road, multiple buses going past, a couple of joggers, a taxi idling away right in front of us for the entire recording, and other cars passing by - all this often drowns out the sound of the bells, as Oxford enjoys perhaps its last evening of vague normality for quite some time."
Part of the #StayHomeSounds project, documenting the sounds of the global coronavirus lockdown around the world - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds