‘This is their way of phasing us out': inside the busking battle in central London
It's a glaring hot afternoon and noise permeates Soho: shrieks of kids on school trips, '80s anthems blaring from pedicab speakers, the clumsy honks and growling engines of passing traffic. Turn the corner into Trafalgar Square and you're met with the sounds of amplified guitar strums and the sight of a growing crowd of couples tapping their feet, toddlers bobbing their knees and teenagers clapping their hands in time to a rendition of Coldplay's 'Viva la Vida'. Busker Johan Satre has them in a gleeful trance.
After waiting in a queue of buskers since 8.30am before finally getting a slot at midday, Satre has a firm hold over his audience of around 40 to 50 people (a smaller crowd than normal, he tells me afterwards). After his grand finale ('Dancing Queen' by ABBA), the crowd line up to tap their phones onto his contactless machine as another busker starts to set up equipment within a large yellow circle marked on the ground – one of the few legal amplified busking pitches left in the borough.
For as long as streets have existed, so have street performers. For centuries, fiddlers, troubadors, bards and one-man bands have serenaded the capital city, with the likes of Rod Stewart, Simon and Garfunkel and Ed Sheeran among those honing their trade on London's streets. At the same time, buskers have always been a divisive feature of the city. After several centuries of existence, they were only effectively legalised in the 1980s when British courts ruled buskers were in fact not committing an offence under the 1824 Vagrancy Act. In the past they've been dubbed vagrants, beggars and most recently, akin to 'psychological torture'.
That's what a judge said in March during a court case between Westminster city council and Leicester Square businesses. Led by Global Radio (who own Capital, Heart and LBC radio stations) and the Hippodrome Casino, the companies and local residents took the authority to court for failing to 'abate a statutory nuisance' – in other words, failing to keep rowdy buskers and their amp volumes under control, particularly at night.
Office workers complained of being 'plagued' by 'out of tune' musicians playing 'Sweet Caroline', being forced to take meetings in cupboards and to wear noise-cancelling headphones. The trial concluded with buskers being completely banned from Leicester Square – for now, at least.
While that was a first of its kind case, a crackdown on central London's street performers has been stirring for several years. This is the buskers' side of the story.
Now, it's a legal matter
'Singing a song is a criminal offence these days, apparently.'
A month before the Leicester Square trial comes to a head, I'm chatting to singer-songwriter Harry Marshall over Zoom. Speaking in a mild Aussie accent, he's visibly despondent.
After seven years of performing on the streets of Westminster, Marshall now holds criminal convictions for busking illegally. He had called Piccadilly Circus his second home, making a living singing and playing guitar there, since 2018. 'It was a great way to make music my full time job,' he says. 'Everyday I got to connect with hundreds of people emotionally and musically.'
So, when he found out that a licensing scheme had been introduced by Westminster council in 2021 – with the aim to 'strike a balance between supporting performers and addressing issues related to noise, obstruction and inappropriate locations' – he dutifully applied.
Under the new rules, buskers had to now pay to play in designated spots across the borough. It dictated that performances must end before 9pm, musicians have to play a 'varied repertoire' and only use amplifiers in designated spots. Prior to the scheme, the City of Westminster was home to seven amplified pitches. Once the rules were passed, that dropped down to four, though Marshall and several other seasoned buskers I speak to, say that half of those aren't worth playing on.
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'[The pitch at] Marble Arch is terrible because there's no foot traffic,' Marshall says. 'The only time you're not allowed to busk there is during Winter Wonderland when there are actually people there.' The other, he says, is King Charles Island, the small roundabout at the bottom of Trafalgar Square, which is 'wildly dangerous because there's moving traffic yet your job is to build a crowd.'
That meant that suddenly, street musicians were queuing up for a 40-minute slot at one of the two viable amplified pitches remaining, marked by large yellow circles: one on Leicester Square and one at the top of Trafalgar Square. Demand for the limited pitches was high and it became harder to get enough slots to make a living. Marshall tells me that lots of performers who had been on the scene for decades simply gave up. He himself soon found that abiding by the rules wasn't going to be sustainable if he wanted to continue busking for a living. In protest, he decided not to reapply for a licence when his expired two years later. Then, he went back to play at the Piccadilly pitch that had been his stage for the best part of a decade.
'I got a lot of warnings from the council,' he recalls. 'But this was my way of saying: this isn't right. If I adhere to the licence [rules] I'm not going to be able to pay my rent.'
A year and a half later, Harry was taken to court by Westminster Council. He pled guilty and slapped with eight charges of busking without a licence with the prospect of a £1000 fine per charge plus litigation fees. 'Luckily the judges saw sense and realised I'm a street performer, I don't have £10,000 in my account.'
He says, resolutely, that the busking community in central London 'hate the licensing scheme' and it's widely believed that 'this is their way of phasing us out.' Four weeks later, amplified street performers were outlawed from Leicester Square.
Press rewind
For most of the UK and London, buskers don't need a licence – they simply have to adhere to a code of conduct (such as being mindful of noise levels and respecting the environment) and are kept under control through public space protection orders. But over the last four years, Westminster City Council has enforced some of the country's strictest rules around street performing.
Like Marshall, keyboard player Elliot Herrington has witnessed the crackdown play out in real time. He moved to London from the south coast in 2017 and started regularly busking at Tottenham Court Road two years later. 'The busking scene at that point was amazing,' he recalls. 'It was completely free and on the 25-minute walk from the bottom of Tottenham Court Road all the way to Marble Arch, you'd probably see at least 10 buskers. Everyone was sharing spots, there was zero pressure from the council and people loved us, especially the tourists.
'I used to busk with a DJ and a sax player and we'd have three or four hundred people dancing in the street. They all stayed for hours – homeless people dancing next to people in suits, children next to grandparents. There was so much community and love. Now you go up Oxford Street and there's maybe one [busker], if you're lucky.'
We used to have four hundred people dancing in the street
When Herrington returned to his (now illegal) Tottenham Court Road pitch after lockdown, he was informed that he wasn't allowed to play without a licence and yet, in a catch-22, his application was denied on account of him having played before being made aware of the rules. He tried to continue without the permit but tells me that by 2024 'you could not busk once on any given day without someone from the council coming up to you'. That's when he began to give in: 'At that point they had started sueing loads of buskers. I had my last warning and because I'd seen my mates get actual convictions, I decided I'm just going to accept that I can't play there anymore. Then I moved to Camden and the same thing happened. It was so much hassle.'
Shanilee Tordilla, a regular on the Leicester Square pitch pre-ban, tells me that even with the license, busking had been made harder. 'It didn't take long to realise that the licence wasn't benefitting us but doing the opposite,' she says. 'If you had the licence then you had more opportunities to be prosecuted. There are people who don't know about the licensing scheme and frankly they get away with it because they just come and go as they like.'
Serena Kaos, a local busker and member of the Westminster Street Performers Association (WPSA) agrees that those who follow the rules responsibly and abide by the licensing rules are being lumped into the same category as the buskers that play at excessive volumes in antisocial hours and being made to suffer the consequences. 'The buskers that are part of the WSPA are typically very reasonable. We operate on community-based actions.'
Amping it up
But if noise is the problem, wouldn't the solution simply be to ditch the microphone, switch off the electric amplifier and perform acoustically? 'Go and stand in the middle of Leicester Square and tell me that if I played or sang completely acoustically that anyone would even hear me,' Harry says. 'You need a certain level of amplification. The art of street performance is about capturing people's attention and holding them for a short amount of time to impress them enough to drop a coin in your case. That is hard enough to do in itself, let alone without an amplifier.'
Kaos echoes his argument: 'Music does not cut through more than one metre in a central location like Leicester Square. By taking amplification away, you're just taking away street musicians.'
Two years after the licensing scheme had been introduced, Westminster Council released a policy review. It revealed that noise complaints had actually increased considerably since the rules had been implemented. Between April 2021 and May 2023 there were 5,070 complaints lodged, up around 1,000 compared to the two years before. It reported that 'some buskers argue that due to the limited opportunities, they can only get onto the Leicester Square pitch once in a day, so they must play louder to attract audiences and maximise their potential earnings. This has meant that the volume can be much louder than they would use normally.'
Still, prior to the ruling, the WSPA and the council had been taking regular meter readings (buskers are allowed to play on designated amplified pitches at no more than 78 decibels) and, according to Kaos, had agreed that members weren't playing to levels that could be considered a nuisance.
What's next?
'With all the venues shutting down can we at least let people play on the street? What sort of grey world are you trying to create?' Herrington asks. He struggles to be optimistic about busking's future in the city. 'I hate to say it but it's done. I think a lot of buskers are quite fragmented from each other so it's quite hard to get everyone to rally together.'
Nevertheless, the WSPA plans to fight to get the Leicester Square pitch back or at least get another pitch to replace it, with intentions to protest on the square every fortnight or so. A spokesperson from the organisation told Time Out: 'The solution lies not in banning street performance altogether, but in working together to establish reasonable compromises around volume levels, speaker types and designated locations. Leicester Square is a cultural landmark – not just for tourism and commerce, but for expression, spontaneity, and opportunity.'
When I stop by one of these demonstrations, they're met with mixed reactions. Some members of the public stop to read the WSPA's appeal and sign its petition, encouraged by a supporter who has been coming to the square specifically to listen to its musicians for the past eight years. But there is also some hostility, with one man interrupting a protester mid-song to voice his disapproval.
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'I understand. If I was working somewhere and there's someone playing ''Wonderwall'' all day long I would go crazy,' says Mary Valiaka, music director at What Does Not, an organisation that champions London's grassroots musicians and backs the WSPA's cause. 'But there needs to be a middle ground'.
She argues that pushing performers off the street will have a detrimental effect on London's (already dwindling) live music landscape as a whole. 'With busking, you learn how to engage, be charismatic and have a good presence,' Valiaka says. 'And that's 50 percent of what makes a good live performer. With busking under threat, how are people going to learn how to be a good live performer?'
Kaos adds that central London streets provide an important stage for musicians from less privileged backgrounds. 'Working-class musicians don't get the opportunity to be musicians for a living very often. As working class performers, it allows you to have a platform in the first place.'
Herrington is one such success story. Through his street performing, he got the 'opportunity of a lifetime' to tour with rising star Myles Smith. He was seen by a scout on the street and now plays keys in Smith's band. This summer he'll be playing at Glastonbury and on stadium stages across the globe supporting Ed Sheeran. 'I'm doing all this crazy stuff and it has all come from busking. I cannot quantify how impactful playing on the streets has been for my music career. I would not be where I am today without it.'
Westminster city council has now appealed the Global Radio court ruling and is awaiting a response. A spokesperson told Time Out: 'Our view is the effect of the abatement order is too restrictive in controlling all buskers for the whole of Leicester Square and instead should have been limited to the single amplified pitch that was the basis of the Global Radio case.
'We believe that, with sensible measures in place, we can find a fair solution that minimises disruption while allowing performers to do what they do best.'
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