When the ambient hubbub and general noise of Liverpool reduces to a murmur, that’s when people notice it.
It’s there all the time of course, well, subject to small periods of not being there, but masked by that general stuff, so it’s usually only at night that people are truly noticing it. It won’t let them sleep. For them it’s like having to sleep in the same room as a large fridge with all its variously changing noises from the motor and the cooling gasses forcing themselves around.
It is of a very very low frequency, this offending problem. For some it is probably outside of their range of hearing. For others it is really annoying and won’t stop. It keeps them awake at night.
I’m talking about the ‘Merseyside Hum’, or ‘Scouse Rumble’, or whatever it might be. It is a constant sound a bit like a cross between a far distant barely detectable huge sub-woofer playing away in the boot of a car and a large throaty generator left on in the next room. Except, the result of this combination isn’t loud and obvious.
It’s all very low frequency and almost at the point of being a vibration that can be felt rather than actually heard, yet is annoying. Really annoying.
However, it doesn’t seem to be a localised phenomena. It is being heard at various locations between Southport and Central Liverpool. The only common pattern appears to be closeness to the sea, but this is an approximately 20 kilometre coastline of, well, the noise. Everybody hearing it is hearing it within a few kilometres of the sea. This, probably wrongly, points to it being of seaborne origination.
I could instantly jump up and down and point at the various offshore wind-farms we have here, but I have no real evidence it is one or more of them, or that they could create such a noise over such a distance.
So, what is it?
What’s making the Liverpool noise?
England's England 