Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. This is the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Viv Jones.

In 1971, a group of squatters took over a disused 17th century military barracks

on the edge of the Danish capital Copenhagen.

They established a hippie community which they called Freetown Christiania named

after the surrounding district of Christianshown. It's still there today and

it's one of the oldest and largest communes in the world. We came into an old

military architecture you know and was allowed to turn that ordered reality to create the

total opposite, a place where we could kind of play games.

If you wanted to roller skate without clothes on the old day playing on a violin, we could do that.

Danish filmmaker Jorunbank Carlson was among Christiania's first settlers. He was 21 years old, a student in film school.

He remembers clambering over the fence one night with his girlfriend,

into a vast ghostly space with grand old barracks and warehouses.

It was like a huge playground, you know, you could move into a huge factory,

military factory and take over the whole place.

We squatted a very old building where originally was explosives for the old cannons.

It was a very beautiful building right on the edge of the

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