'Fetch the Engine' is a collaborative sound installation by Andrey Chugunov and Bobby Jewell that explores how Londoners experience and adapt to increasingly frequent periods of extreme heat.
Composed from field and crowdsourced recordings, interviews, everyday urban soundscapes, broadcast media, social media fragments, and voice expressions, the multichannel installation examines the relationship between climate change, labour, urban infrastructure, and the rhythms of everyday life. As heatwaves become a defining feature of London's climate, the work asks what it means to inhabit a city that continues to operate as though the environmental conditions surrounding it have not fundamentally changed.

While prolonged heat transforms the physical city by drying parks, overheating homes, straining transport networks, and placing increasing pressure on public infrastructure, the city's acoustic character remains remarkably constant. Traffic continues to flow, construction persists, offices remain occupied, and public transport carries commuters through increasingly difficult conditions. Against this backdrop, the most perceptible signs of adaptation emerge not through infrastructure but through conversation. Exhausted voices, weather reports, passing remarks, media commentary, and the shared language of discomfort become markers of a changing climate.

The title, 'Fetch the Engine', references the nursery rhyme London's Burning, invoking the city's long history of responding to catastrophe, from the Great Fire of London to contemporary climate emergencies. Rather than framing heatwaves as exceptional events, the installation positions them within a broader history of urban transformation and asks how cities respond to recurring crises while questioning whose experiences remain unheard.

Through an evolving spatial composition, the installation layers field recordings made by Bobby Jewell, including sounds of construction sites, transport systems, domestic interiors, data centres, schools, offices, streets, news broadcasts, people's sighs, lamentations, and exhales, along with crowdsourced recordings sent by the audience in advance. These overlapping sonic environments reveal the contradictions of a city that simultaneously acknowledges and ignores climate change, exposing the tension between increasingly extreme environmental conditions and the persistence of everyday urban routines.
Rather than proposing technological solutions or visions of an ideal future city, 'Fetch the Engine' invites listeners to consider climate adaptation as an embodied and collective experience. By attending to the everyday sounds of labour, movement, exhaustion, and resilience, the work suggests that meaningful responses to climate change require not only changes in infrastructure, but also new ways of listening to the environments and the people already living through it.