Over the course of 2020, I worked with On The Record on a project celebrating 60 years of Housman's radical bookshop. Housman's, based at 5 Caledonian Road in London, has been a hub for activism since it's founding. It was home to the LGBT+ helpline Switchboard, the pacifist newspaper Peace News, and the London branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
On The Record convened a group of young volunteers, and worked with them to record 60 hours of oral history interviews with activists and others who share the history of the building. I ran workshops with the volunteers in field recording, collecting sounds from inside the bookshop, and audio editing using Reaper.
The volunteers transformed these histories into radio plays and verbatum theatre pieces with the support of artist Lucy Allan. I produced the sound design for these pieces, illustrating them with sounds recorded in and around the building and elsewhere.
The soundworks are housed in a beautiful interactive website. Some of the works were animated by Lauren Veevers below.