This week’s selection comes from Paul Wilson, Curator of Radio Broadcast Recordings. Given that the surviving recordings from British radio’s first decade, the 1920s, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and that most of those are unintelligible, it was astonishing when proof finally emerged of something long…

Mary Stewart introduces the new BL web resource If Homes Had Ears. Open your ears, draw back the curtains and peek into domestic life as you may never have heard it before.

This week’s selection comes from Holly Gilbert, Cataloguer of Digital Multimedia Collections. Husband and wife, David and Mairead, are expecting a baby any minute now! Mairead is already in labour and they came across the Listening Project booth while taking a stroll through a park near the hospital as a…

It is hard to imagine a set of circumstances in which the possession of a vinyl record of a Christian minister would be illegal. But this did happen, and not so long ago. The year was 1966; the country was South Africa; and the speaker was Dr Martin Luther King…

By Dr Hannah Silva, British writer and performer and Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. Paula Varjack selfie. “What you actually do is you use your eyes as a pen,” David J is telling me how he learned to freestyle, “off the dome.” We’re sitting…