In March 2022 a full set of digital copies of recordings of ‘Damara-Nama’ musics now archived in the British Library was returned to the Indigenous rights holders in Sesfontein, north-west Namibia. These recordings were made in 1999 by French ethnomusicologist Emmanuelle Olivier, assisted by the late Minette Mans, an ethnomusicology…

Above: Edmundo Ros in Amsterdam, 1957. Photo by Harry Pot. The Unlocking Our Hidden Collections initiative is the British Library challenging itself. With over 170 million items in the Library’s collections and an average of over 8,000 new items added every day, it is impossible to keep up. Processing and…

Many yoga classes begin and end with the practice of chanting. Chanting aims to purify the mind by increasing both the mind and body’s attention. This in turn helps various people focus on the present, silencing the noise around them by releasing a smoothing feeling. One of the benefits of…

As September starts in the northern hemisphere, for me (and I suspect many others) this means one thing – ‘back to school’. This could be both memories of one’s own school days, or the relief as a parent or carer that ordinary term time routines can resume. From my childhood…

In my spare time I have often pondered what would count as the ‘Seven Wonders of South London’. The Catford Cat and the Croydon IKEA towers no doubt, but the Crystal Palace transmitter and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs? And how do you separate the component parts of Greenwich? For this…