BBC Radio 4 Listening Project Booth comes to the West Midlands.
The BBC’s Listening Project Booth is coming to the West Midlands for the first time as part of a national tour, with the mobile recording studio coming to Moseley, Birmingham city centre and Solihull town centre at the end of June and the beginning of July.
The Listening Project encourages people across the UK to record a conversation with someone close to them on a subject they’ve never discussed intimately before. The results are edited and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in programmes introduced by Fi Glover.
The West Midlands dates are as follows:
Saturday, June 27th-Sunday, June 28th – Moseley Park, Birmingham
Monday, June 29th –Tuesday 30th June – Birmingham Cathedral
Wednesday, July 1st – Mell Square, Solihull
BBC Listening Project producer Mark Newman, says: “Do come and say hello to find out more about The Listening Project. Perhaps there’s a conversation you’d like to have, but haven’t got round to yet – we can get you started. And why not tweet a photo of the Booth while you’re here.”
The Listening Project Booth is a Radio 4 collaboration with the Royal Institute of British Architects to design a mobile recording studio for the project. The commission was awarded to London architecture firm JaK Studio, whose design took the form of a speech bubble and was inspired by the iconic Airstream caravan.
Listening Project conversations are archived and made available at the British Library for future generations to hear. So far over 600 conversations have joined the British Library’s extraordinary collection of over 6.5 million sounds, where they are available to everyone for research, enjoyment and inspiration.
Fi Glover, presenter of The Listening Project, says: “The Booth is a thing of great beauty and wonder. The most important thing about it though is the fact that we can now bring The Listening Project to a suitable safety-checked hard standing near you to make it even easier to sit down and have a chat for posterity and take up the chance to become part of this nation’s bank of experience and memory – growing every day in the Listening Project archive at the British Library.
“Once inside the booth you feel as if time belongs to you for a while – just to talk and to listen. In our fast-paced noisy world it’s lovely to be able to shut the door and just muse for a bit. And it’s got the best fake ‘real fire’ I’ve ever seen in what is essentially a gorgeously pimped up caravan.”
Whether you’ll be able to ask when our region will get a fair share of BBC spending isn’t known.