The Unlocking Our Sound Heritage team here at London Metropolitan Archives were very sad to learn today of the death of Ian Rawes, peacefully at home after a short illness. He will be remembered as a sound recordist, an ever-engaging raconteur and of course the founder of the London Sound Survey, the archive of which was recently acquired by the LMA. But most of all he will be remembered as a lovely, gentle man with a fascination for the world around him and a real gift for sharing it.
In 2019 he was interviewed for this blog by our volunteer Paul Skinner and you can read it again here. Tony Herrington’s obituary over on The Wire’s website also offers further insight into a remarkable life, well-lived and well-loved. But perhaps we should leave the last word to the man himself – here is Ian talking about some of his favourite sound recordings for BBC World Service back in 2016, displaying the characteristic warmth and enthusiasm that endeared him to so many:
Alongside his recently released field recordings album Thames and its predecessor These Are The Good Times, his body of work will live on through its preservation here at the archive and will doubtless go on to provide inspiration to future generations of Londoners. But it’s sad indeed to think that his voice will no longer be around to guide all those future listeners…
We’ve worked with so many audio collections here on Unlocking Our Sound Heritage that it’s sometimes hard to imagine a part of London life that doesn’t feature somewhere among the thousands of items that have passed through our hands. Art and culture, education and faith, stories of love, war and smuggled oranges – it’s all here, safely preserved for the benefit of future generations. But there can’t be too many archives that fire up the imagination more than that of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which London Metropolitan Archives acquired back in 2019. Can there be anything that has proved a more enduring part of the Capitals’ changing soundtrack over the centuries than the ringing of the bells, chiming in celebration or mourning, summoning generations of the faithful and above all marking the passing of hours, days and years?
Until it finally closed its doors in 2017, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry was a steadfast part of the city itself – indeed one piece of correspondence included with the collection contains the amusing footnote on the envelope ‘don’t know the postcode – but it’s been there for 400 years’!
Britain’s oldest manufacturing company, it was established in 1570 and cast Bow Bells, the Liberty Bell and hundreds more for churches across Britain, Europe and the world – and also famously recast Big Ben. The Foundry’s audio collection predominantly consists of tapes recorded and acquired by master founder Douglas Hughes, whose grandfather Arthur Hughes took over the foundry in 1904. There are recordings of bell-ringing across London – including St Mary-le-Bow and St Paul’s Cathedral, both cast by the foundry – and around the globe, from Guernsey to Jamaica, Australia and America. Highlights from the United States include the first peal of the bells of Washington National Cathedral in 1964, a recording of the Liberty Bell beamed from the Atlas satellite in 1975, and – on a more personal scale – tape letters sent to the Hughes family from clients and friends in Missouri, New Jersey, Illinois and Philadelphia. All these audio treasures arrived in our studio as an assemblage of tape reels of various sizes and ages (plus a handful of cassettes) with accompanying notes and correspondence, all of which were carefully documented and catalogued by the UOSH project team.
In early 2019 we came across a spool of tape in the collection labelled simply ‘Kent 16’ and containing ‘extracts from ‘a peal of treble bob 16 in’ rung [on handbells] at Watford by John Maine and his band’. As luck would have it, playing such a vintage two-track mono spool on a ‘modern’ stereo tape machine creates an interesting side-effect for the listener: you end up hearing both sides of the tape simultaneously, one playing forward and the other in reverse.
By pure chance we discovered that when both sides of this particular recording were heard together in this way, a beautiful new soundwork was created entirely by accident: the chiming and reverberant soundings of the forward and reverse bells mulched together into a sort of hypnotic groove – a glorious wash of drifting ethereal ambience that transforms an already beautiful performance into something not too far from the territory of such modernist composers as Terry Riley, La Monte Young or perhaps Brian Eno. The latter is of course widely credited with inventing much of the concept of ambient music as we think of it today, with numerous classics of the genre as Music For Airports and On Land bearing his name. But equally fittingly, Eno is also renown for Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards he developed with Peter Schmidt in the 1970s that contain gnomic instructions designed to aid musicians and other artistic types experiencing creative block. Within such a collection the instruction ‘play both sides at the same time’ would certainly not feel out of place, and so in that spirit, we’re presenting the recording exactly as we found it – hiss, hum and all. Here’s what it sounded like:
It goes without saying of course that the original contents of the tape went on to be digitised, catalogued and preserved in an entirely correct and appropriate manner, along with all the other recordings in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry sound archive. But we’ve kept this little outtake as a special by-product of the digitisation process, a ‘Happy Accident’ that we thought you might enjoy too. We called it ‘Treble Bob 16 In Accidental Ambience’ and the name has stuck. We did consult a respected campanologist to enquire as to whether placing two sides of the recording together entitled us to brand the new piece a ‘Hextuple bob 32 In’, but while they enjoyed the recording our query was met with an emphatic ‘absolutely not’!
While the UOSH project exists chiefly to preserve and safeguard vintage recordings such as these, an equally crucial aspect of our work is inspiring new generations to listen and respond; and it wasn’t long before our Accidental Ambient recording was heard by Kirsty Kerr, an Archives and Digital Media Trainee on placement at LMA and working alongside the UOSH project team. A conceptual visual artist and curator outside of her archive work, she was inspired to use this recording and others from the Foundry archives in the realisation of a performance and installation piece at the Church of St. Leonard’s in Shoreditch later that year.
The Woven performance and installation at St Leonard’s Shoreditch
Kirsty takes up the story: The Woven was a site-specific arts event celebrating the heritage of St Leonard’s Shoreditch, a church whose bells get a mention in the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ nursery rhyme: ‘When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch’. Through an artist residency at the church – and some exciting discoveries at the London Metropolitan Archives – I had the opportunity to showcase a new work inspired by these famous bells, and the local foundry that cast them.
At the time, I was volunteering with the LMA’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage team, assisting with cataloguing and digitising the Whitechapel Bell Foundry sound archive. The archive contains interviews and recordings of bell ringing and tuning at the foundry, which is best known for casting famous bells like Big Ben and the Liberty Bell. Through volunteering with the UOSH team, I discovered that the foundry also cast the ‘Bells of Shoreditch’.
The present-day St Leonard’s was designed by George Dance the Elder, and opened in 1740 on the site of a collapsed medieval church. Its original ring of 8 bells cost £800 5s, and were cast by Thomas Lester, Master Founder at Whitechapel. These were gradually recast and replaced over the centuries (including the old tenor on display in the church – the largest bell cast by Barwells of Birmingham), but the first bells date back to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
I wanted to create an artwork that highlighted this link between the foundry and the church. While exploring the Whitechapel Bell Foundry archive, I had the idea of playing some bell-ringing recordings back into the church building. When Robin (the UOSH Sound Engineer) played me the ‘Accidental Ambient Bells’ track he’d made when digitising the old tapes, I thought it would be the perfect sound! The layered peals created a sense of layered time, bells recorded in the past being played in the present, into a church that had perhaps heard them before…
I used this digitised recording as part of a multi-sensory installation and performance in the church portico, using taste and smell as well as sound to animate the heritage of the space. While the bell peals played, visitors were greeted with the scent of citrus oil and dried orange slices, and offered a ‘Eucharist’ of oranges and lemon juice as they entered.
The Woven event was part of St Leonard’s creative engagement programme in 2019, inviting artists and community members to respond to the heritage of the site. This was part of a wider church restoration project with the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which included the renovation of the bell tower. Last year, the ‘Bells of Shoreditch’ rang a special peal to celebrate the completion of the programme – and ‘Len’s 280th Birthday’.
It’s a wonderful thing indeed to think this archive material made over half a century ago is already helping to inspire radical new work in a space so inherently connected to the bells’ history – even if it did take a slight twist of fate and a little bending of the rules to make it happen. What would John Maine and his band say, we can’t help wondering? And while the Foundry’s historic Whitechapel home may face an uncertain future, its legacy lives on in the bells that can still be found in active service all over the world and its tape collection now safely digitised and held at London Metropolitan Archives for anyone who cares to listen.
To give Kirsty the last word, Another reminder of the importance of projects like UOSH, working to save intangible heritage at risk of being lost. Who could disagree? You can discover more about Kirsty’s work here and more about the long and distinguished history of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry here.
The church portico held a number plaques commemorating bell-ringers for their “extraordinary peals”- including this one from 1777
During May, a new learning resource was launched for teachers by the UOSH project; in partnership with A New Direction. Aimed at Key Stage 3, the resource focuses on the creative habit of being inquisitive.
Linking to curriculum themes around local histories, the resource centres on newly digitised archival sound clips from LMA’s archives on the prominent Black political activists, Eric and Jessica Huntley, who participated in many campaigns for racial and social justice. Using the sound archives from events at their bookshop and publishing company, along with prominent Black British poets, students create ‘zines’ to document their learning on themes relating to voice, identity, language, education, activism, resilience, and community.
Hannah Kemp-Welch (UOSH Learning Coordinator) tells more …
Why we chose to focus on this topic
This resource draws from the archive of prominent black political activists Jessica and Eric Huntley to explore topics of difference, and trace how attitudes in society change over time. The Huntley’s played an active role in the British African-Caribbean community from their first arrival in England in 1956, and worked on seminal campaigns challenging institutional racism. This resource considers their work as publishers profiling Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic writers, including the celebrated poets Lemn Sissay, Valerie Bloom and John Agard.
London Metropolitan Archives is a public research centre which specialises in the history of London. We care for and provide access to the historical archives of businesses, schools, hospitals, charities and all manner of other organisations from the London area. The majority of items in an archive are unique, handwritten documents which cannot be seen anywhere else; we have 100 km of books, maps, photographs, films and documents dating back to 1067 in our strong rooms – you could call it the memory of London. We are currently focusing on work with our audio collections as part of a UK-wide project Unlocking Our Sound Heritage. This project recognises that archival sound collections are under threat, both from physical degradation, and as the means of playing such sounds (reel-to-reel machines, DAT, compact cassette, MiniDisc) disappear from production.
Between 2018 and 2021 LMA aims to digitally preserve almost half a million rare and at-risk sound recordings, from oral histories to world music, academic lectures to urban soundscapes, including those in this resource. This work means we can keep seminal speeches of Londoners such as Jessica and Eric Huntley safe for future generations.
It’s important for students to explore difficult topics creatively
These materials are a vehicle to explore tough topics. Through examining primary sources, students develop research skills and critically analyse assertions. Creative activities include making a zine and improvising with spoken word, making space for challenging discussions in the classroom about the experiences of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people in Britain. The example set by the poets in the archive shows the affect of our words when sharing our reality, and inspires us to use creativity to connect with others and build a fairer future.
We are passionate about the social history of London, and the power of the voices within the archive to help us connect with the past. Though the archive is vast, we have selected bite-sized clips so students can hear directly from the protagonists and witness the intensity of their words. Selections include activist Eric Huntley advocating for self-publishing to challenge the dominant culture, educational psychologist Dr. Wavney Bushell reporting back on students’ experiences of racism in schools, and John Agard’s performance poetry unpicking the colonisation of language. Listening to these speakers helps us feel the urgency in their struggle, and prompts us to consider how these issues appear today.
Learning how to be inquisitive
Through listening to historic audio recordings from the archive, we open out conversations about race and racism, activism and social justice, which are widely discussed in the media today. Students are challenged to consider why some people felt that the education and criminal justice systems were not in equal service to all sections of society in the 1980s, and reflect on current movements such as Black Lives Matter and calls for the decolonisation of the National Curriculum.
Activities develop critical thinking habits in students, encouraging them to be inquisitive, ask questions and examine a range of sources to develop a viewpoint. These are crucial skills for young people today in an age where social media can platform fringe views, information goes unverified, and politics is increasingly polarised.
Thinking of the future
The Huntleys’ belief in the power of the written and spoken word and importance of history in education motivated them to preserve their records. They hoped it would inspire young people by improving knowledge about black heritage within education and wider society. We hope that young people are charged by what they hear, and in homage to the sacrifices made by the Huntleys, consider their role in serving their community.
The final lesson in the sequence offers students the opportunity to create their own sound responses to the themes explored in the resource and share with them with LMA.
One of the few advantages to spending much of 2020 in lockdown was that it inspired many of us to go exploring in our own personal archives, rummaging in garages, lofts and sheds to dust off old records and tapes and uncover some fond memories – and maybe even a few surprises – in the process. Here Tim Hughes, part of our hugely valued team of volunteer cataloguers, writes about how suddenly spending a lot more time at home throughout the last year inspired him to go delving amongst the musical treasures of his student years, a time he enthusiastically describes as ‘a golden age’. As he elaborates ‘they were great days, and I fondly remember being knocked out by seeing Roxy Music in the early 70’s at the Dome in Brighton, as well as being transported by Hawkwind’s live rendition of Silver Machine when the stage seemed to lift off (also at the Dome) and blowing my whistle and dancing along wildly to Osibisa at the University. Takes me back!’ And because inspiring and empowering others to preserve their own recordings for future generations is such an important facet of the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project, we’ve asked him to tell us more about his experiences. It’s a journey across time, across the internet – and also across the ceiling. Over to you, Tim!
I nearly injured myself crawling around the attic under the eaves, but finally found the old equipment I had bought in my late teens with savings from my Saturday job, before I went to university. Stored wrapped in newspapers dating from 2006 (they hadn’t seen the light of day for 14 years!) I found myself drawn to a prescient article. A swan had been found dead in Scotland, and had tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza!
My equipment, a Thorens TD 150 deck, Armstrong amplifier and Wharfedale speakers, was routinely used to play my collection of vinyl records – a mixture of soul, R&B, Motown, reggae, classic rock and electric folk.
Fortunately, having connected it all up, Bill Withers Live at Carnegie Hall played beautifully as if yesterday, with analogue equipment bought 50 years ago. I was taken back to our top floor shared student flat in Brighton, overlooking the sea, where the kit got a lot of use and abuse in between studying for a BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Sussex.
I had a tinge of sadness that the past 14 years had seen my vinyl records from the 60’s and 70’s unloved and unplayed in favour of newer tracks on digital. I had been missing out on the wonderfully illustrated album covers and sleeve notes, and vinyl tracks that I never replaced with digital versions.
Being relatively new to cataloguing, and enthused and energised by my work with Kate the Catalogue Editor for the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project at London Metropolitan Archives, summarising collections on a well-designed pro forma spreadsheet; I planned to set up my own catalogue and individually capture each album, artist and track listing on Excel. However, the project’s Audio Engineer Robin saved me an enormous amount of time and effort. His timely advice came in very handy!
“I think I mentioned Discogs.com (short for Discographies)…….which I use daily to identify and access items in my record collection. It’s perfect because it doesn’t just identify band name and release, it can help you work out which pressing you have, country of origin, how rare it is, whether it’s unusual in any way. I think I’m right in saying the site is largely run and maintained by its members and that there is a members area, where people can log in to post comments, reviews, add releases, correct errors, buy and sell etc. As a result many members list and document their own collections”
“I can’t comment much on this (I have far too many records to start cataloguing them online now!), but I certainly have friends who I believe are using Discogs as a way to catalogue their own collections. Although I’m sure Kate would counter that this is almost certainly just a glorified online spreadsheet!”
I now have all my vinyl records from my personal collection neatly catalogued. It’s easy when you get the hang of it. I have had a great time working out which particular edition of the record I have. This extends to cross checking what is engraved in the ‘run out’ the blank area where the grooves stop. There are some unexpected discoveries to be made! Did you know, for example, that Linton Kwesi Johnson ’sBass Culture and Forces of Victory LP’s both have ‘Buy and read ‘Race Today’ scratched on the run out areas, and that ‘Your place in history has been assigned’ is scratched on Steele Pulse Tribute to the Martyrs?
It has been wonderful rediscovering and savouring each of my vinyl discs, reading the cover and liner notes, looking through the data supplied by other Discog members, and re-listening to tracks that I’ve not explored for many years now. Regrettably I’ve not hit gold in terms of rarity, but nonetheless I was surprised that Catch a Fire by The Wailers and Bob Marley, with the sleeve in the shape of a Zippo lighter, is valued at £200.
I now regret giving away my original controversial copy of Electric Ladyland by Jim Hendix, now worth up to £288, and David Bowie’s Hunky Dory worth up to £535!
It’s great to have a visual catalogue with my vinyl collection in one place, which can be sorted by artist, title, label, and year, and to use the search function to recall other precious vinyl from past and present. Thanks Robin from UOSH for helping me unlock my own sound heritage!
Valentines Day, sometime in the mid 1990s. You and Jemimah have been going steady for a whole year already and you feel this anniversary must be celebrated appropriately. Besides it being the most romantic day on the calendar, you’re both clearly ready to take the relationship to the next level and now some kind of amorous gesture is required to solidify and strengthen this union. But what will it be? You’ve come up with an offering that you’re absolutely convinced will blow her socks off! Throwing on your loudest shirt, you grab the keys to the convertible and head out into the night. Parking up together in your favourite spot of absolute pitch darkness, you chivalrously lean in to present her with…. a diamond ring? A bunch of red roses? A promise to take off that shirt and set fire to it? No! Every one of these options pales in comparison to that ultimate token of undying devotion: a CD-R in a plastic presentation case, lovingly adorned with a tracklist scribbled in proficient blue biro. Cupid – take the night off!
Against all conceivable odds, this plan proves a blistering success. Jemimah is completely enraptured and demands to know if you’re a magician. Even the disc’s opening song – a sort of limpid guitar instrumental so inconsequential it seems to be both playing and erasing any memory of itself at the same time – is greeted as one might a vision of the divine. Your date really is going very well indeed and this whole romance thing is an absolute doddle! Thank you, recordable CD technology and especially that particular ‘cool electronics company’ that made it all possible. What could possibly spoil this happy scene? It’s NEVER going to stop being the 90s!
With the benefit of 21st Century hindsight, while this video may throw up its fair share of questions (Where exactly are they? What is going on with his wardrobe?), one thing we can be pretty sure of is that this freshly-burned copy of Entirely Forgettable Love Songs will have long since ceased to function. A terrible blow for languid guitar enthusiasts everywhere – and for great swathes of our nation’s sound heritage, by extension.
A quick history lesson: Launched in 1982 and developed in tandem by Philips and Sony, the original compact disc was a revolution, boasting a potential 75 minutes of crystal clear digital audio on a surface just 120mm across and only 1.2mm thick. Audio data is recorded as a series of binary digits embedded on a spiral 5km long and over 60 times thinner than the groove of an LP; a series of pits and spaces that is converted into analogue sound when read by a laser. With the digital audio content being protected from scratches and fingerprints by a layer of plastic, CDs were initially touted as being indestructible, with some TV presenters at the time feeling confident enough to demonstrate by attacking them with stones or spreading honey all over them (we would strongly advise against trying either of these at home). In spite of such childish stunts and the initial high cost of the technology, the CD was quickly adopted and became the dominant format for commercial music right up to the present day, only really superseded by the rise of digital streaming and download services in the 21st Century. It’s easy to see why – the CD boasts far better sound quality than a cassette and greater portability than a vinyl LP. They’re certainly not indestructible and are prone to scratches, smudges and other marks on the playing surface causing the disc to play incorrectly – or in severe cases refuse entirely. But if a conventional CD has clearly been well looked after, is in visibly good condition and has been kept safely in its box; there’s a pretty good chance that it should provide reliable playback for decades to come. Sadly, the same can absolutely not be said for what came next…
Another remarkable display of shirt-wearing!
Despite their comparatively recent development in 1988 and a fairly close resemblance to their compact disc cousins, the recordable CD or CD-R is a far more unpredictable specimen and undoubtedly the most troublesome of all the formats we’ve covered here as part of the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage Project. The simple fact is that they degrade extremely rapidly – even in ideal storage conditions a lifespan of ten years for a CD-R is considered optimistic, and with so many brands of varying quality on the market, many discs will be lucky to last even that long. Unlike a conventional CD, the digital data on the disc is suspended within a dye that breaks down over time, while the addition of sticky labels and marker pen to the top surface can cause further problems. Even if the disc appears in good condition and your CD player is willing to play it (which is never guaranteed, by the way), audio distortion, skipping and other issues caused by ‘disc rot’ or errors in the manufacturing process are surprisingly common. On the very rare occasions when we’ve come across an item that has completely refused to give up its contents, 95% of the time the pesky little troublemaker is a CD-R. It’s a shiny little nightmare.
So, for those of you organising your home collection or personal archive, one of the most important first steps is to be able to differentiate between the regular CDs and CD-Rs in your possession, as they are basically at opposite ends of the preservation scale. Thankfully, the differences aren’t usually too hard to spot, especially when placing the upturned discs next to one another and comparing the colouring of the playing surface. Regular CDs will be predominantly silver, while CD-Rs will more often have a blue or greenish tinge. We’ve found ‘the bluer the disc, the greater the risk’ to be a pretty helpful and accurate mnemonic. It’s a good idea to perform this colour test on everything, even the more ‘professional’ or ‘formal’ looking CDs in your collection, as many independent or ‘bedroom’ labels continue to release albums on CD-R even today – the lower manufacturing costs and the ability to make very short runs clearly proving too much of a temptation! If any doubt remains as to what kind of disc you’re working with, simply play safe and treat it as a CD-R, then make plans to digitise the contents at your earliest convenience. Better to be safe than sorry!
As part our commitment on the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project to not only preserve our nation’s audio treasures for future generations, but also to empower the Great British Public to do the same, we’d like to hereby invite you to our inaugural Sonic Surgery, a free event which takes place online, 1-2pm on Wednesday 24th February, where our Audio Engineer Robin Warren will be discussing the pros and cons of various analogue formats and highlighting some of the issues that one might face during preservation and digitisation.Tickets are free but limited and all are warmly encouraged to bring along some old records and tapes for a show and tell. It should make for a fun and informative hour. We promise Robin won’t spend the entire sixty minutes just complaining about recordable CDs, but you have to admit it’s a strange situation we find ourselves in when an original 1950s acetate tape reel of President Tito addressing the LCC has aged better than a walking tour of Southwark created almost half a century later. And yet here we are: The former still works without too much trouble, but the only way to hear the latter would be to try and track down the original participants and ask them if they’d mind having another go!
Southwark – pay it a visit and give your ears a treat!
At the close of our opening video time-capsule, the final shot pans slowly up to the night sky while our hero addresses the camera directly and expresses his confidence that they will be enjoying their new CD recorder ‘for many, many years to come’. We can only hope that their bright young love has endured longer than the average CD-R. And that he threw away that shirt…
During lockdown, UOSH volunteer Tim Hughes finished cataloguing Woodberry Down Memories, a collection of oral histories recorded on the Woodberry Down estate in 1986 and 1987. In this post, he explores the context of the collection and shares some of his favourite clips…
Home to over 6,000 people, Woodberry Down Estate is situated in the London Borough of Hackney. In a picturesque setting, next to two reservoirs and alongside the New River, the four acres of large houses and gardens that preceded it were compulsorily purchased from the Church of England in 1935 by the newly elected Labour London County Council. The estate was planned with relatively low densities and large open spaces for working class Londoners, although war intervened and the first residents did not move in until 1948. By the time the project was completed in 1962, 57 blocks of flats had been erected on 64 acres of land. The health centre – a model for the new NHS – opened in 1952 and Woodberry Down School – the first purpose-built comprehensive in the country –opened in 1955.
Map of Woodberry Down Estate, 1949 (London Picture Archive 278158)
In the 1980s the oral historian Joanna Bornat led an oral history project on the estate, working with a group of older residents as part of the Over 60s club. The project culminated in the community publication ‘Woodberry Down Memories -The history of an LCC Housing Estate’.
Bornat’s experience was captured in an interview and discussion published in Oral History Magazine Volume 39 Past and Present 2011:
“You said in ‘Woodberry Down Memories’ that it was a very diverse community. Is that diversity reflected in the oral history cohort that you managed to record?
JB. Yes it is. I mean, it wasn’t so much in the group who actually formed and met every week. There was one woman who came, an Afro Caribbean woman who would come but who would never speak, even when Grace (her fellow worker) was there. Grace went out and interviewed a couple of people who are in the book – Mr and Mrs Kalra. And Mr Shah, he was very much part of the group and very keen and he and his wife were stalwart members of the Over 60’s Club as well. And of course the group themselves, their histories were very ethnically diverse, you know, Sid Linder’s Jewish, Olga Adams Italian …”
Some members of the group at London Weekend Television’s award ceremony, June 1987, from the booklet published after the project. Left to right: Grace Harris, Sid Linder, Fred Townsend, Olga Adams, Les Tucker, Edythe Daly, Mr Kalra, Mrs Kalra, Jack Cox, Joanna Bornat, Dora Marks, Doris Hampton.
Joanna describes the estate: “This was an exceptional piece of housing, social housing, it was well researched, well designed, [the LCC] spent a lot of money on it, people liked living there and you had everything you needed you know. It had a school, two schools, a doctor’s surgery, it had an old people’s home.”
As the Star newspaper headline put it in on 7 November 1953: ‘Woodberry Down Estate: London County Council’s Great Experiment’.
Photographs of Woodberry Down School. Left to right: classroom, 1954; tuck-shop, 1959; workshop, 1955 (London Picture Archive 192000, 199256, 199285)
Model of Woodberry Down Health Centre, 1949 (London Picture Archive 229423)
The tapes, held at Hackney Archives, have recently been digitised and catalogued at LMA as part of the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project – resurfacing the voices of this resilient generation, one shaped by poverty, war, discrimination, prejudice and disadvantage. Listen below to discover a wonderful range of rich stories of working class people, brought together through the common experience of being allocated a flat by the authorities and together forming a new community.
Yet the interviews also reveal common experiences with current generations – preoccupation with family and relationships, the local area, schooling, dealing with people in authority and the rules we have to live by, and concern about the affordability of housing for their own children, who are priced out beyond their locality and roots.
There are so many personal stories to listen to, value, learn from, and enjoy. Here are a few brief excerpts:
Sid Linder talks about gangs in Clerkenwell and Aldgate (ULMA031/1)
Olga Adams talks about training as an oxy-acetylene welder during the Second World War (ULMA031/3)
Interviewees talk about the issue of rats when the workmen moved out (ULMA031/4)
Olga Adams talks about hosting visitors from Belgium and Scotland at her flat on the estate (ULMA031/6)
Olga Adams talks about her father being classified as an ‘enemy alien’ during the Second World War (ULMA031/1)
An interviewee describes fitting out his flat on the estate – and how he secured one (ULMA031/7)
Dora Marks talks about the lack of amenities on the estate when she first moved in (ULMA031/8)
Explore more photographs of Woodberry Down on the London Picture Archive, and read about Hannah’s experience of cataloguing the collection on placement here.
Since 2018, the Unlocking our Sound Heritage (UOSH) project at London Metropolitan Archives has been digitising a selection of sound archives from across the capital. These include oral history, world music and the performing arts. To date we have preserved over 6,000 recordings, making the job of creating this 30 minute compilation … a challenge.
How did we do it? Well, we asked members of the project team and our wonderful volunteers to select and introduce their favourite.
We had a fantastic time pulling it together, below you will find the tracklist:
Intro Track 1 – Wheelchair Ballroom Dancers, The Ealing Saints | Brent in Sound Track 2 – Poetry by Merle Collins | Bogle-L’Ouverture Track 3 – Memories of WWII rationing with Christa Gulliver | Southern Housing Group Track 4 – Creating Music in Class | Inner London Education Authority Track 5 – Interview with Charles Esche | Audio Arts Track 6 – Memories of Petticoat Lane Market with Hyam Gilbert | Interviews with Hackney Residents Track 7 – Community life with Joan Foster | Five Women Track 8 – The childhood memories of Muhammed Asif | Muslim Communities Project Outro
Thank you in particular to our volunteers for their contributions – Sophia, Richard, Tim and Gosia.
As we’re coming into the final year of Unlocking Our Sound Heritage at LMA, over the next few months we’ll be sharing highlights from the collections we’ve digitised and catalogued (so far!) on #SoundSundays
The UOSH team are the London hub for the project, but not everything we digitise was recorded here in the big smoke. This week our #SundaySound is a recording of Radio Free Grenada from August 1980. But how did it end up in our studio?
The recording was made by Jean Tate, tutor warden of Clapton Youth Centre, an Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) funded youth centre based in Hackney. Under the leadership of Tate and Anslem Samuels, the Centre was strongly committed to anti-racist action and education.
Clapton Youth Centre ‘Open Evening’ poster (LMA/4550/03/01/002)
In 1980 Clapton Youth Centre became the first of three youth groups from London to visit Grenada, which had been taken over by the People’s Revolutionary Government the previous year. Other recordings from the trip include a conversation with Leon Cornwall, chair of the National Youth Organisation (NYO), and an ‘Ah Caramba!’ dance show.
Radio Grenada was one of the first institutions taken over during the ‘People’s Revolution’, and the renamed Radio Free Grenada became a vital channel of communication across the islands. In between music, broadcasters discussed the political situation and put out announcements about what was going on in the community – as heard in the clip below.
While touring around the island, the group from Clapton Youth Centre stayed in a cottage in Morne Rouge, near the Radio Free Grenada studios. In a scrapbook compiled during the trip, Tate noted that she visited the ‘heavily guarded studios’ – and that the most played record on the station was Bob Marley’s ‘Uprising’.
Jean Tate’s scrapbook from the trip (LMA/4550/03/02/04/009)
The Radio Free Grenada studios – and their tapes – were destroyed by American forces in October 1983. In this cassette, then, we have a slice of history – thanks to Jean Tate and Clapton Youth Centre (who you can just about hear in the background, if you listen carefully…)
‘Wow! This is incredible… Like the soundtrack to ‘Alien’ or something!
It’s safe to say that the presenters of BBC London’s regular ‘Making A Difference’ feature were intrigued when an extract from the inaugural edition of ‘Sounds From Home’was chosen to open their weekend bulletin back in May. It was the first in a planned series of short video tutorials suggesting creative or practical projects to undertake during lockdown, using material from London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) as sources of inspiration.
On this occasion we were galvanised into action by the discovery of some experimental graphic scores found in a 1976 educational boxset from the Inner London Education Authority(more commonly known as ‘ILEA’), which managed educational provision in inner London between 1965 and 1990. Inside the box we found five reel to reel tapes, a teacher’s manual and various posters of graphic scores, each an exercise in composition that swapped the conventional crotchets and semi-quavers for shapes, colours and symbols. It was effectively all you needed to start making your own experimental music, so we thought ‘why not?’
‘The Space Journey’ by Hamish Preston
By combining the original progressive spirit of the graphic score with a few basic instructions for newcomers, we aimed to help people create their own journey into the far reaches of outer space – all without needing to go outside. It was our hopeto bring the ideals of this ILEA boxset into the twenty first century and to inspire a whole new generation of youthful sonic explorers to set out on their own voyage of discovery – each armed with only a few household items and a sense of adventure. Here’s what we came up with:
But where exactly did this boxset come from in the first place? Now that we’ve travelled through the cosmos, let’s take a trip back in time. To offer a sense of the broader educational environment of the late 1960s and 1970s, we highly recommend watching ‘Music in School: A New Sound’, a television programme produced for BBC Schools in 1969 by John Hosier – who also produced the long-running BBC series Music Time. It features pupils from Shoreditch School and Ivydale Primary School engaged in numerous exercises in experimental composition and performance, before using these sounds to tell the story of a journey into space, to a far-flung celestial body known only as ‘the planet Galaxy’. We’d recommend making yourself a hot beverage and just settling down to watch the whole charming, wondrous affair in one sitting. Can you remember your music classes at school being anything like this? We certainly can’t!
Watching it over half a century later, what makes this programme especially fascinating is the emphasis on several themes – an understanding of sound, an imaginative interpretation of instructions and a sense of co-creation, or collaborative creativity. Obviously, something quite fresh and exciting was going on at this time – and this was still a full seven years before our boxset came into being.
In those years between 1969 and 1976, this more experimental approach to listening and making music moved into the mainstream of music education in London’s schools. This was due to the rise of electronic music in the popular consciousness and also to a few remarkable people who worked in ILEA’s music department and various organisations in its wider orbit (no pun intended).
We were particularly excited to spot the name John Baker in the boxset’s credits as ‘Audio Producer / Editor’. There could be little doubt that it was the same pioneering composer who worked for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop from 1963 to 1974, best remembered for his astonishing work mixing jazz with the latest developments in electronic music.
John Baker at the Radiophonic Workshop studios at Maida Vale – unknown photographer
For the uninitiated, this short video provides a brief history of the Radiophonic Workshop and attempts to place it in context, demonstrating the influence that its output had on generations of music makers, many of whom would have been schoolchildren in the 1970s. Mention the name of this hugely influential BBC department to your average electronic music enthusiast and just watch their eyes light up as they enthuse about its seismically important role providing music and sound effects to the TV series Dr. Who, particularly the iconic theme tune. Originally composed by Ron Grainer, it transformed into an eerie, otherworldly voyage through the ministrations of the late electronic pioneer Delia Derbyshire and the ever-affable engineer Dick Mills – in fact Grainer’s first response to hearing their treatment of his work was rumoured to be simply ‘Did I write that?’. Note the frequent use of visual language in this fascinating video describing how the theme was put together:
In a time before synthesisers and computers made electronic music a more simplified process, members of the workshop would use household objects, rudimentary electronic equipment and the experimental cutting and splicing techniques of musique concrète to create the sounds of other worlds and conjure up nightmarish creatures – bringing modernist avant-garde sounds into the nation’s living rooms every Saturday teatime as it did so. But while the Radiophonic Workshop is perhaps better known for soundtracking the nefarious misdeeds of Daleks and Cybermen, they were also instrumental in bringing the sounds of the future into our schools – starting with the gymnasium.
This is the BBC Schools LP Movement, Mime and Music from 1969, created to accompany the long-running radio series of the same name. It features a number of compositions under the title ‘Radiophonic Music – Useful For Movement’, including John Baker’s ‘Structures’, one of the most remarkable works on an already remarkable album. Composed by Baker a year earlier, the sleeve-notes describe it as ‘An abstract ‘space’ sounding composition which, after hearing several times, could be built into a dance structure, with individual movers working separately and then towards group sculptures at certain points of the music, which then melt and reform as a different sculpture’. Watch the video below and you’ll notice it makes a rather fitting soundtrack for modernist architecture as well!
We’re so used to hearing electronic music in every facet of our lives now that it’s easy to forget what a seismic impact these sounds would have had in the 1960s. Compositions like ‘Structures’ were not created by computer and synthesiser – which at the time would have been prohibitively expensive. They were quite literally created by hand, using whatever implements were available and painstakingly cut and spliced into a final arrangement on a reel to reel tape recorder, using razor blades, sticky tape and a steady hand. Writing in 2008 for the release of archive collection The John Baker Tapes on Trunk Records, John’s brother Richard Anthony Baker offers us a tantalising glimpse into his work:
John invented many techniques. He recorded onto reel-to-reel tape the sound of everyday objects, such as the twanging of a ruler on a desk or a cork being pulled from a bottle. By changing the speed of the tape, he could alter the sounds’ pitch and was then able to compose a melody from these sounds by, for instance, making a minim fill four inches of tape, a crotchet, two, a quaver, one, and so on. More cleverly, if he wanted to introduce a jazz feeling to the tune, he cut a note slightly short so that it anticipated the beat. The work was painstaking and demanded a steady nerve. But it was the job for John. He loved it and was never happier.
John himself describes the compositional process in this archive clip discussing an eight second jingle he created for the long-running BBC series Woman’s Hour. Listen to the intricate complexity of this recording and marvel at the fact that the whole thing was put together by cutting and splicing innumerable tiny snippets of tape!
While John appears to have taken a less creative, more editorial role in the production of ‘Creating Music In Class’, his years at the Radiophonic workshop and the creation of so much remarkable sound would have made him the perfect candidate to help bring the sounds of the future into the classroom. And it’s important to remember that despite the avant-garde ideas in play throughout the Creating Music in Class teaching programme, it is still very much the classroom it was intended for. Indeed, the intended age group is specified as 10-13 years, which is all the more astounding when you consider that the handful of compositions on the accompanying reel to reel tapes don’t sound that far off from the experiments being simultaneously conducted across Europe by grown–ups!
By encouraging the use of household items in our own video, we hoped to encourage viewers to think creatively about sound making, in particular those without access to more conventional instruments. It was also intended as something of a tribute to John’s work extracting intriguing sonic textures from cider bottles, popping corks and twanging rulers. Furthermore, the decision to concentrate on making our sounds using a single glass was also, in its own way, a small nod of appreciation to Shoreditch School’s Brian Dennis, his class of ‘69 and their experiments together conjuring up ‘heat, radiation, relentlessness, intensity, stillness’. All words that could easily be applied to our current year of 2020!
So, what are you waiting for? There are far worse ways to observe social distancing than travelling through the cosmos with a wineglass! We’re hoping this video will inspire a whole new generation, old and young to get creative and come up with their own soundtracks to the score, or better still, make their own graphic score and create music for that. And if you come up with something interesting, be sure to share it with us, either by getting in touch or by posting it online with the hashtag #SaveOurSounds. We can only speculate as to what the music team at ILEA would say if they knew that something they’d created in 1976 was still inspiring new generations of sonic explorers today. But we’re pretty certain they’d roll up their sleeves and jump right in themselves…
Copyright is everywhere. Each time you listen to a piece of music, watch a television programme, or open a magazine, you will come across ideas, images and products protected by copyright law. Copyright exists to serve the interests of creators. It ensures their work is not exploited or misappropriated. Yet for most people, it’s the last thing they think of when looking at a painting or listening to a piece of music.
I’ve spent a year with the Unlocking our Sound Heritage (UOSH) project working as a rights officer. I’ve cleared copyright for a variety of sound recordings, including oral histories, educational resources and commercial radio broadcasts. I have come to appreciate how vital copyright is, and how complex and multi-layered copyright in sound recordings can be. Here are some of the most important things I have learnt over the past year.
Unlocking our Sound Heritage will help save the UK’s sounds and open them up to everyone.
1) Always Do your Research
Copyright holders need to be traced before you can publish any material. For a UK wide sound heritage project like ours, it’s vital to get clearance from rights holders before recordings are put online. There are often multiple rights holders to contact for sound recordings. The three main categories of rights holder are:
– The sound recordist or producer (whoever physically recorded the material)
– The performer(s) – this is anyone who speaks, or otherwise creates a sound on a recording
– The owners of the embedded rights included in the recording i.e. authors of literary works included in sound recordings or composers/lyricists of pieces of music included in the recording.
In an ideal world, sound recordings come to you with a fully documented provenance, consent forms, and a full list of credits for everyone involved. However, in reality this rarely happens. You need to use all the information you have and be diligent with your research to fill in blanks and identify contributors. I’ve found social media very useful for identifying performers. Never be afraid to approach people via these platforms – they can yield really positive results.
All research must be thoroughly documented to ensure you have met due diligence standards. Set up detailed logs to document your research and make sure they’re updated regularly. Keep on top of the paperwork from the offset, and you’ll have a clear paper trail proving you have made your best efforts to trace copyright holders.
3) Know when to cut your losses
I decided I would contact people three times before assuming they wished to decline permission if there was no reply. It’s important to have a cut-off point to avoid the feeling that you’re fruitlessly chasing, and to be efficient with your time.
4) Have a friendly and straightforward cover letter
The documentation that accompanies rights clearance is, by its nature, full of legal language and can be off-putting for rights holders. It’s a really good idea to have a cover letter that sets things out in plain and simple terms. This signals to rights holders that you want the process of clearance to be as transparent and easy as possible.
5) Detail is everything
Make sure you have everything listed correctly in your official documentation. You need to ensure all recordings are named correctly and nothing is left off. This saves time and means you don’t have to keep going back to rights holders for additional clearance.
And finally….
6) Prepare to speak to some amazing people
Talking to rights holders has been the highlight of this past year. I have spoken to such a diverse range of people, all with fascinating stories to tell. Playing a small part in reuniting people with memories of times gone by has been an honour. Sometimes relatives are hearing the voices of loved ones for the first time in years, and are thrilled to know these memories will be preserved. It goes to the heart of what makes the UOSH project so special – preserving moments in time for future generations to hear, and allowing voices from the past to be enjoyed well into the future.
London's Sound Heritage 