TEN OR TWELVE PAUPERS BREAKING STONES, EXETER, 1843.

 On 28th January, 1843, this letter from 'A SUBSCRIBER' was published in The Western Times:

"Sir, 

Some gentlemen of Exeter, styling themselves Commissioners of Improvement, have for months allowed a most abominable nuisance in the shape of a depot for stone for the road to be brought into upper Paul-street; and as myself and my family are daily and hourly annoyed by the incessant hammering of 10 or 12 paupers in breaking these stones, I should wish to know for what length of time, the Commissioners alluded to, intend to further trespass on our patience and forbearance.  A spot of ground so valuable ought surely not to be appropriated to such an illegitimate purpose and one so disgraceful to the city.

"If a spot for stone-breaking be necessary, let the Commissioners go on Northernhay, where they would annoy no one and at the same time show a little feeling for their neighbours and payers of the improvement rate."

I have been weighing in my mind whether I would rather have ten or twelve paupers breaking stones outside my city residence or ten or twelve homeless hanging thereabout swigging from bottles and rolling  cigarettes.  It seems to me the stone-breaking paupers then were perhaps of  some use to the city in a way the  homeless now are not. 

Noise pollution in the city, like city-centre residents' concerns generally. gets little consideration I think.  There is a lot of unnecessary noise that I could catalogue.  For example there is a new breed of ghetto-blaster that can produce as much volume as a symphony orchestra playing Brueckner,  there are the Exeter College, juvenile motor-cyclists with defective silencers to their machines, there are car-radios blasting the peace of a car-windows-open,summer's day,,  there is the depressing rattle and roar when the bottle-bins are emptied; there are, of course, for ever,  the road-works to be done and, not least, there is Exeter's speciality, the rowdy  drunken crowds and individuals' 'acting out' in the city streets every evening, mornings too,  shouting and screaming and altogether unchecked. and unchallenged. 

And we are promised a Winter Wonderland coming to provide an abominable nuisance for any one who lives, moves and pays council tax within half-a-mile of Northernhay Gardens about which one might borrow from SUBSCRIBER the comment: a spot of ground so valuable ought surely not to be appropriated to such an illegitimate purpose and one so discreditable to the city.

I much enjoyed the subjunctive in the SUBSCRIBER'S last paragraph.