*Please see the Sound Diaries Bandcamp for Hannah’s field recordings 

“Stay away from the subway at night!” warned my parents. Growing up near Ryparken station in Copenhagen, the underpass provided a convenient route home. Shattered glass, a faint smell of urine, and dim lighting characterised the path.

Now, it has been replaced by an overground footbridge and the subway turned to a cloudburst basin to mitigate flooding. With the rejection of subways due to safety concerns, the changing needs in the climate crisis, and perhaps cyclists and pedestrians being given a more dominant role over motorised vehicles (one could hope!) in future city planning, these passages may completely vanish from our landscape in the future. As a result, I’ve felt drawn back to the pedestrian tunnels of my youth. I’ve become curious, even about the underpasses that I pass through regularly as I travel to work, go shopping, run errands, see friends, and transport my kid to nursery.

Over the last months, I have been recording sounds in and around pedestrian tunnels in Brighton, Wales, Oxford, and some of the few remaining subways that I remember frequenting when growing up in Copenhagen.

“Move!” engines roar
over bodies disappearing
into waves that grow louder,
forcing weight over tracks,
only one rat will survive.

Oscillating ruptures,
nails cemented into being,
fixture twisted,
pushing shadows over litter.

Location: Horsepath and Eastern Bypass Road, Oxford
Date: 23.02.2024

I am surprised to find that it takes me only a minute to walk in at one end and out the other in my local pedestrian tunnel. In one minute, a blood cell makes a full circuit of the body. The brain has thirty-three separate thoughts. Two million Google searches take place. Two thousand four hundred trees are cut down. The walls are painted in light grey. The space feels uncomfortably narrow as you enter. I’m nearly scraping the walls as I try to give way to a cyclist passing through at pace. The tunnel has LED lights that run along the top of the wall to one side. Many are broken, panel coverings shattered. A beer can is squashed into the gap between the lamp’s steel frame and the ceiling. One light is sending out a warm yellow hue, perhaps suggesting that yet another bulb is about to go.

He shares his grandmother’s recipe for preserved apricots
in Warsaw where she placed them
whole into jars for winter
only to be told by her daughter
that you must pit them
she didn’t listen.

Location: Long Lane and Eastern Bypass Road, Oxford
Date: 23.02.2024

The bright orange walls of this tunnel surprise me. The inviting colour seems at odds with the textured concrete walls and ceiling that spike you like an angry cactus if you get too close. Orange, like the colour of my childhood bedroom walls. I chose it myself. The shade of orange was called ‘Butterfly’, and I loathed the choice throughout my teenage years. Those years were defined by transitions, as well as a constant wrestle with decisions. Every little choice felt final: choosing school subjects, to be or not to be someone’s girlfriend, music practice or friends, weighing the teachings of major world religions. After all, my bedroom wall colour choice had been final.

Pedestrian tunnels played a role here. You enter, you walk for a bit in a state of neither here, nor there, which you accept because even if you can’t see the exit upon entering, you know from experience that tunnels are designed to bring you out on the other side. Eventually, you see the opening, daylight is streaming in, and you put one foot in front of the other until you’re up there again, out in the open. I would bring most of my important decisions to the tunnel. I would enter with a beating heart and a difficult choice to make that had been haunting me for days. I would allow myself to fully enter the ephemeral nature of being in-between, knowing that it would only last a minute.

“Don’t walk back too much ‘cause it’s the sea,” he says, then giggles as he watches me approach the exit, walking backwards out of a pedestrian tunnel, hearing something he does not hear. Seeing something I don’t see. I hear the breathing ocean licking sand on shore, surface wet and cared for by the elements.

Location: Kings Road, Brighton
Date: 14.11.2023

Underpasses are strange non-places that seem to be designed only for passing through. No wavering, no lingering, no leaving a trace of your presence. It is as if their harsh surface and dimly lit interiors are architecturally designed to repel anyone hoping to find shelter.

Still, I think of them fondly. Stepping underground can be a brief escape from the noise and commotion above. I take a deep breath, and my heart rate calms. I exchange the soundscape of the vast outdoors with the acoustics of the narrow, enclosed tunnel. It feels like a sonic embrace, where my ears retune to more intimate sounds like water persistently dripping from the ceiling and the sound of footsteps clattering off the hard-surfaced walls. All this, reverberating against the now muted overground soundscape of the city. As I step out into the natural daylight, I notice my ears adjusting once more, and I’m aware that I’m a little changed somehow.

We meet where
water collects
and drains
conversations soaked
in weather.

Location: Fredensbro, Nørrevold, Copenhagen
Date: 01.03.2024

“Hurry up,” a parent shouts at their kids. They need to pass under two tunnels before they can safely reach the other side of the roundabout to the bus stop where number 400 departs. The toddler asks why the grate on the ground at the entrance is missing. I too am keen to know because I cycled over it yesterday. Now there is no grate marking the entrance to the tunnel. Just a strip of hole in the ground where the water runs off the pavement and drains away.

I struggle with transitions. In between jobs, in between cities, in between flats, in between my pregnant body and someone who mothers. However, I have come to realise that sometimes the in-between is a necessary space to be for things to change for the better and for things to become unstuck. A place where you know you can’t linger but at least you can take the time it takes to walk in at one end and out the other. Perhaps you don’t really like it in there. Perhaps there’s a faint smell of urine, a scrunched-up McDonald’s bag, a broken light, and a dead toad in a puddle. You move through it.

Dead toad floating
looking for somewhere safe
to cross
into a new body.

Location: Littlemore Roundabout, Oxford
Date: 23.02.2024