City Beach fountains, Southend, 2017

In Southend they have these fountains on the seafront. They’re not new but they haven’t been there forever, but they are popular; don’t know if the Council or the Seafront Traders stumped up for them.

In this recording, they had been going at full pelt but had subsided to sort of knee height. At the start you might be able to hear adults laughing, this is because one of them was horsing about running in and out of the fountains. A motorbike makes a bit of noise. It was what it’s like on a warm weekend evening, the last one of the school holidays.

Finally the jets came back to something like full power, surging up and down which meant more people getting more wet and making more noise, and, if you hear that at about 9.45 of an evening you know things are ticking over nicely in this corner of Essex.