Sound, stories and new perspectives: site-specific curated sound tours of the British Library

Have you ever wandered around the British Library in St Pancras and been intrigued the art, architecture and spaces? Have you ever wanted to hear more voices from the many narrators in the sound collections? Then lucky you – we have the perfect way for you to spend 40 minutes of your time this October!




Recording of the week: a Tamil lullaby

This week’s selection comes from Christian Poske, AHRC Collaborative PhD candidate and Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. The English musicologist Arthur Henry Fox Strangways recorded this Tamil lullaby with the title Lālishrīta in South India during a recording trip through the Indian subcontinent in 1910-11. An outcome…




What’s that? Surely music – The Gerald Cavanagh Collection

Magid El-Bushra with the Gerald Cavanagh Collection By Edison Fellow Magid El-Bushra, counter-tenor and Assistant Content Producer at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden Sudanese boys growing up in Willesden Green tend not to fall in love with opera. But an encounter with Miloš Forman’s classic film Amadeus was to…




Recording of the week: Toscanini and Beethoven

This week’s selection comes from Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music Recordings. Arturo Toscanini was famous for his outbursts of temper on the rostrum and ruled his orchestras with a rod of iron. His style is well suited to heroic music and one of his best interpretations is of Beethoven’s…




Open House 2018 – Alexandra Road Estate, Camden

This weekend is Open House and one of the highlights is the Alexandra Road Estate, which features heavily in the British Library oral history collections.