Iron rimmed cart wheels would do it (you needed a lot of carts) along with all the people you needed pre-combustion engine to carry stuff around. https://www.y

Iron rimmed cart wheels would do it (you needed a lot of carts) along with all the people you needed pre-combustion engine to carry stuff around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVQiEJW7RWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVQiEJW7RWg http://www.victorianlondon.org/transport/traffic.htm http://www.victorianlondon.org/transport/traffic.htm Clogs (wooden shoes worn routinely in earlier centuries) with nails in for gripping the slippery cobbles. Victorian London would have been seriously loud I imagine, at least in the main roads. Then you had music. http://vichist.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/sounds-of-victorian-london.html http://vichist.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/sounds-of-victorian-lo... However, I think that the grandparent post may have a point: European cities do have dense cores, so cars tend in many cases to be routed around the edge of the core in a 'ring road' system. As a practical example, Birmingham UK has extended the Metro into the very city centre, removing car traffic from a few main streets. It is noticeably quieter now in those streets compared to before the changes. When the system is fully operational, we will see how the acoustic footprint changes. Once outside the main streets of the city, but still within the central core, you can find pockets of quiet - song thrush/nightingale quiet.