This musical approach to bad behaviour may hit the right note

One of the great pleasures of city life is the astonishing variety of the urban soundtrack. Over a ground bass of traffic noise are laid the twiddly riff of a blackbird singing on a chimney pot, the percussive clatter of a police helicopter and the jocose or plaintive arias of late-night drunks. But on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, north London, they are about to experience a harmonious addition to all this found sound. Adam Weber, a young police officer in charge of the estate, plans to fill the area with classical music, broadcast through speakers in an attempt to reduce antisocial behaviour.

Weber pinched his melodious wheeze from a pilot scheme on the London Underground, but the idea has a venerable lineage. From Plato to Prospero, music is acknowledged as a benign but effective means of social control. “The isle is full of noises/sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not,” says Caliban in The Tempest – to which the shipwrecked Stephano responds, in the tones of someone who has just discovered Spotify: “This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing.”

The modern conceit of using classical music to disperse troublesome teens dates back to at least 1985, when 7-Eleven stores in British Columbia played it to discourage youths from hanging out in their car parks. It is not entirely clear whether it is the sounds themselves that have the deterrent effect, or the associations with terminal uncoolness. Either way, champions of classical music have objected vehemently to its use as a form of pest control.

The music critic Norman Lebrecht called it “profoundly demeaning of one of the greater glories of civilization”. But perhaps music is more resilient than he imagined. An education in music appreciation is not the object of Constable Weber’s exercise, but among those youths whom the music is intended to affront, a few might find themselves unexpectedly beguiled, so that one day Broadwater Farm could become notorious, not for social unrest, but as the place that produced the next Chevalier de Saint-georges or Julius Eastman.

Nobody loves a tourist. In Venice, Barcelona, Paris and Rome, the summer influx of guidebook toting dawdlers is bitterly resented. But a more cerebral kind of discontent is seething in the West Country, where thousands of German tourists flock annually to worship at the shrine of Rosamund Pilcher OBE. Pilcher, now 92, is the Cornish-born author of romantic novels including the bestselling Shell Seekers, whose telly adaptations, with their sweetly predictable happy endings, have a mesmerizing effect on the Teutonic psyche.

The problem is that the German visitors are unable to distinguish between Cornwall and its neighbour, Devon. According to Holger Lenz, head of Berlin’s Visitbritain: “People here think [Devon] is just part of Cornwall.”

You can see why Devonians would be miffed. While Cornwall, as the setting for Poldark, The Camomile Lawn, Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek, is a magnet for fanciers of middlebrow fiction, Devon has its own claim to literary distinction: home to Henry Willlamson, Ted Hughes and, latterly, Hilary Mantel. More than enough bookish firepower there, you might think, for a Devonian counter-attack – if only someone could persuade the Germans to appreciate Weltschmerz, rather than schmaltz.