Revealing

Walking west from Hammersmith Bridge, along the north bank of the Thames in London, you will encounter unlikely neighbours. Jostling between the paupers’ graves beneath Furnival Gardens, the Dove public house and the boat house of the “Men of the Thames” is a single Georgian building of architectural and historic distinction, and a squat two-storey workshop of unprepocessing charm. Here is a speech site where a history of orality reveals something more than oral history, a

location where locution might be amplified in order to discern an ethics of speech for an emerging metropolis.