'Big Issue' Sellers Are Something to Shout About In the 18th and 19th centuries, the "Cries of London" were a popular commodity of the urban picturesque. Coloured prints sentimentalising vocal street traders such as innocent milkmaids and cheeky chimney sweeps were hung on Victorian parlour walls, and their sales pitches were arranged in sheet-music form for genteel singing and playing on cottage pianos. A survival of this tradition can be heard in the song Who Will Buy? in Lionel Bart's Oliver! In my London childhood, I can remember the coarser shouts of the rag-and-bone man with his horse and cart as well as the street-corner newspaper vendors: "Extra, extra, read all abahd it!" being a cliché of a thousand London movies. Today, however, there is only one Cry of London left, and few of us register it as such. It comes from heroic Big Issue sellers, many of whom across the city have devised repartee, raps, capers and jingles in their efforts to grab our attention. Their creativity offers rich pickings: oral historians could record them for the British Library's sound archive; students could write up the phenomenon for their theses; the topic could make a programme for BBC Four; and a video artist like Gillian Wearing could make them the subject for a Turner Prize bid. This is culture at its most raw and spontaneous, and it deserves a bit of attention.