In 1958, John Connell wrote a letter to this newspaper. He felt that Britain was getting louder, and asked if anyone else had noticed a general increase in noise around them. Sacks of mail came in, full of people in agreement. By 1960, Connell had successfully lobbied Parliament to introduce the Noise Abatement Act, classifying excess noise as a statutory nuisance for the first time ever.

Though Connell’s Noise Abatement Society continues its work to this day, Britain is getting louder. A 2025 survey from the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health found 54 percent of city dwellers thought their environments had become louder since 2020. Freedom of Information requests found there were 440,000 – 241 per day – noise complaints in London over the period, and 31,000 in Manchester, 14,000 in Hull and Portsmouth, and 13,900 in Leicester.

A normal conversation is around 70 decibels. This is the level of sound considered safe. Anything above that, whether it’s heavy traffic noise beside a road (85dB), music played at full volume through headphones (100dB), an emergency siren (110dB) or a jackhammer (130dB), can damage your hearing over time.

This matters, because according to the World Health Organisation, noise pollution is the second-biggest risk to global health (following air pollution). It estimates that in the European Union, around one in five people are exposed to unhealthy levels of road traffic noise. WHO research has found urban noise levels have increased by an average of 0.5 to one decibel per year over the past three decades, with the number of people exposed to harmful noise doubling in the past 30 years.

A 2023 report from the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee argued that noise pollution contributes to “a range of adverse health outcomes, including heart disease and premature death”, citing 2018 research that found “130,000 healthy life years were lost in the UK because of noise pollution”.

Like many city dwellers, I’ve mostly reached the stage where I can just tune out the ambient hubbub of the traffic and crowds. Having grown up in rural Lancashire, where the loudest noises were owls in the tree outside my window and occasional boy racers speeding through the main road in my village, it was an adjustment.

Even if I’ve learned not to hear the noise, it’s still affecting me. According to the British Academy of Audiology, around one in six of us have some hearing loss – at least 4.4 million of those people being of working age – and that only gets worse as we age. It harms our health, too: hearing loss has been linked with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, anaemia, chronic kidney disease, rheumatoid arthritis, sleep apnea and balance problems. The mental health side is even more terrifying: hearing loss is the single greatest risk factor for developing dementia later in life.

It’s not just the rumbling of traffic or persistent chatter that affects us, either. The pings and bleeps that we fill our homes with, from doorbells to smartphone notifications, affect our health, too. But, short of wrapping my entire home in bubble wrap, what could I do to help make life less noisy?

How to dampen sound in your home

The first step to a quieter home is perhaps the most obvious: lots of soft furnishings.

Any hard finishes, from wooden floors to metal lampshades, will reverberate sound and simply bounce it around the room. In contrast, soft furnishings help absorb sound waves to quieten things down. I already own a sumptuous living room rug that helps, but could I do more?

“The effect is enhanced through the use of thicker, high-density rugs crafted from natural fibres such as wool,” explains Laylah Holmes, founder of interior design company Holmes Bespoke, which is regularly asked for help in designing quieter homes. “The deeper the pile, the better the sound absorption. We often specify larger, more sumptuous rugs to maintain a serene environment. Smaller runners work beautifully in hallways.”