Free Thinking: Being Human: What the Archives Reveal

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2016

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

Matthew Sweet visits little known locations in London to meet researchers drawing on archives of the past to cast new light on the present. The Cross Bones Graveyard in Southwark was used in the Middle Ages to bury sex workers and others living on the fringes of respectable society. We visit the site with Sondra Hausner, an anthropologist of religion who's studied modern practices for memorializing the women buried at the site. Vicky Iglikowski and Rowena Hillel are researchers at the National Archives at Kew investigating records that shed light on LGBT history in the Capital. We'll leaf through the records to see what they've uncovered. New Generation Thinker Naomi Paxton and her colleague Ailsa Grant Ferguson have identified a moment when Shakespeare, radical politics, and the roots of the National Theatre all converged, in a building in Bloomsbury used to house Anzac soldiers during the First World War. And we join Peter Guillery, editor of the Survey of London, to investigate the work of this ongoing project to document the streets of London in all their complexity. Part of a week of programmes on BBC Radio 3 focusing on new research. The Being Human Festival which takes place at universities across the UK from November 17th - 25th will feature events linked to these research projects. Both this and the New Generation Thinkers scheme are supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds.
0:32.0	Welcome to the Arts and Ideas podcast from the Freethinking team at the BBC.
0:37.2	We love knowledge on free thinking. We love ideas. We love the humanities. We love intellectual liberty.
0:44.6	We love research and the careful, thoughtful work that goes into quarrying the riches of the archive.
0:51.1	On this programme, we're going to bring you the news from the quarry, several quarries,
0:55.0	and meet the scholars who were engaged in that work. We'll visit a site that's important
1:00.2	to suffragettes, New Zealanders and national theatre goers. We'll visit a modern shrine for
1:06.0	ancient outcasts, a place of ritual with a strange and complex relationship with history.
1:12.2	And we'll go out onto the streets to survey the difference between the past and the present.
1:17.9	But we're going to begin at the repository of this country's past.
1:21.5	It's data, its documents, its clean and dirty secrets.
1:25.6	It's a brutal concrete structure near Kew Gardens in West London,
1:29.8	our National Archives, an official space,
1:33.1	a space with hard edges that you need a pass to enter.
1:36.9	But one, that, as you're about to hear,
1:39.2	contains queer spaces within it.
1:47.0	We're in the belly of the National Archives.
1:49.0	I don't think I've ever been backstage here.
1:54.0	There's silence.
1:55.0	Am I allowed to speak?
	...

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