Celebrating 100,000 digitised recordings with Nigerian hammer and anvil music

Two years into an ambitious, nationwide project, the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage team recently celebrated reaching the milestone of 100,000 digitised sound recordings. Supported by funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Unlocking Our Sound Heritage is a major British Library project focused on identifying, cataloguing and digitally preserving half…




Recording of the week: kids say the funniest things

This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. Watching a child acquire its first language is a fascinating process. At a certain age, children naturally apply rules drawn from their exposure to their mother tongue to create forms which ‘seem’ right. The most obvious example is…




Recording of the week: Nelson Mandela in the UK

This week’s selection comes from Adonis Leboho, Communications Intern for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. Last Thursday, people all over the world marked Mandela Day through commemorative events celebrating the legacy of the heroic anti-apartheid revolutionary. Nelson Mandela fought against institutionalised racial segregation in South Africa for decades, enduring twenty-seven years…




‘My Other Piano’ – the classical side of Winifred Atwell

Winifred Atwell in the late 1950s (1LP0248992 BL collections) Guest blog by Edison Fellow Uchenna Ngwe who is studying Black classical musicians in Britain before 1960 Little is known about the early years of Winifred Atwell but she is thought to have been born in either 1910 or 1914. By…




Memories of the Moon Landing

Where were you when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon? In this blog Dr Sally Horrocks pulls together recollections from the Oral History archives…