Abstract: This thesis surveys the sounds of everyday street and work life to argue for areassessment of the way historians have understood community, space, materiality andidentity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Germany and Britain. It willdemonstrate that sound played an important role in the organisation of urban space andsocial order. Furthermore it will show how the historical subject as listener emphasisesthe volatility of identity, place-making and community. Sounds either defined acommunity through positive responses or created conflict where one group heard thesounds of another group as noise. Sound helps to define the social groups that thisthesis focuses on, such as experts, intellectuals, local administrators, immigrants orfactory labourers. The ephemeral nature of sound and the subjectivity of listening,however, also pull apart such neat definitions and reveal the fractures within each ofthese social groups.Throughout this thesis, differing reactions to everyday sounds in the conurbations ofManchester and D�sseldorf will demonstrate how communities sought to definethemselves and their environments through the production and reception of sound.What emerges is a re-composition of everyday life in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentiethcentury that challenges examinations of it based on images of class, sociabilityand culture. D�sseldorf and Manchester were substantial cities that grew during theperiod studied here and underwent similar processes of technological change thataffected both the social order and the physical environment. This thesis demonstratesthat the audibility of specific technologies, buildings and machines physically affectedlisteners, and that working classes, middle-class professionals and local administratorsall created regimes of noise intent on controlling behaviour in streets and workplaces.One of the key tropes within studies of sound is that listening places the historicalsubject at the centre of their environment while seeing places them outside of it. Usingthis idea, this thesis will make an original contribution to a number of debates. First ofall, sounds broke down visual boundaries between street and workplace and thisdissertation examines how that changes historical notions of place and space. Secondly,this thesis establishes how sound exposes the lines of fracture and cohesion within andbetween social groups that historians of popular street culture have tried to emphasisethrough class relations. Thirdly, sound allows for a re-examination of the powerstructures in which factory labourers and immigrants worked and lived as it presentspractices of listening and sound production that breathe new life into ?histories frombelow? and challenge the top-down approaches associated with governmentality. Finally,this thesis will challenge the notion of noise as unwanted sound, prevalent in thegrowing number of histories on urban noise by demonstrating the diversity of everydayand medical reactions to ?noise? and exploring the problem of ?silence? in negotiations ofmigrant and worker identity and the development of road technologies.Overall, this thesis will determine that the role of sound in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century complicates historical debates on the physical and social organisationof urban space. Different communities transformed their identities around sharedlistening practices and adapted their rhythms of everyday life to sounds that resonatedbetween street and home, work and leisure.