London's Lost World of Sound
British Summer Time
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A second chance for those who missed out in August to spend an evening listening to the wonderful Ian Rawes of the London Sound Survey
Featuring rarely-heard and never-heard recordings of the city’s life from the 1950s back to the late 1880s. These sounds, captured by broadcasters and amateurs alike, bring to life a rowdy, vocal London filled with vigour and eccentricity. Lavender sellers and fortune tellers, the vanished songs of schoolchildren, fire stations and sewer workers, the propaganda and reality of the Blitz – all these and much more are lined up for a night not to be missed by anyone with an interest in the history of recording, of radio, or of London itself.
Ian Rawes, formerly of the British Library’s sound archive, began the London Sound Survey with a collection of 200 recordings five years ago. It has since grown to over 1,500 recordings and has been featured in the national press and on local radio and TV.
In 1999 The Social opened in Little Portland Street. The brainchild of a record company whose offshoots included a hugely successful underground club night, The Social was set up with a simple manifesto – to provide great music and better booze to anyone who fancied tripping through the doors.
15 years later and still run by the original team who created it – Heavenly Recordings & The Breakfast Group – the bar is an award winning London institution. Designed back then by a partnership of David Adjaye and Will Russell (now of Pentagram) with the proviso of withstanding nuclear attack or – at the very least – the worst that people could chuck at it, The Social has launched over a million hugely successful hangovers.
