The first electrical recording issued to the public, made by the scientists of Bell Labs, was of a November 11, 1920 funeral service for the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey, London. The place where the Abbey sits used to be called Thorney Island, described by the charter of King Offa as “a terrible place” and one of the candidates for the spot where King Canute proved that he couldn’t do shit about water. Not long after Canute, the island was tamed, and now contains the oldest garden in Britain, founded by monks a thousand years ago. The place sat between two branches of the river Tyburn, one of London’s buried rivers. The Effra, which once joined the Thames from the south, is now encased in a pipe. Under the streets, the rivers. All the little rivers where, up until maybe fifteen hundred years ago, Londoners used to place skulls on the banks, as offerings and boundary markers. Maps made of skulls. Under the buildings and flowers, the ritual sites that existed all around the Thorney Island area.
Time and maps.
All places with histories of human use have a sound. Many of them were even chosen for their acoustic properties. And the ground and the rock and the bone absorb sound.
Parliament now stands on the ground of Thorney Island. Imagine it with the sound of water lapping against skulls to mark out its borders.