This Slow Radio feature takes us on a leisurely stroll round the park. Parks are always important but during the lockdowns they've become vital to people stuck in cities and towns. Children can still play in the park; grown-ups can still walk, run and even dance there. When a smattering of snow fell in London recently Greenwich Park erupted with people - of all ages - pouring like lava down the icy slopes below the Royal Observatory, on sledges, tin trays, even grill pans. There were snowball sk...
Feb 28, 2021•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Winterwatch's Gillian Burke chooses music and natural sounds that encourage her own personal wellbeing, including lapping waves, doves and crickets from her childhood in Kenya.
Jan 31, 2021•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast A slow radio journey into illumination, drawing inspiration from light beacons and signal fires. Used across the centuries as alert systems and warnings of invasion, but also for celebrations and as emblems of hope, this programme lights up the darkness, conjuring a chain of signal fires and beacons out of sound and reflecting on their meaning and purpose. Drawing on short quotes from literature from Ancient Greece to the present day, we move from the lighting of a match, to the creation of a ch...
Dec 28, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds - from the banks of the River Wye to Kenton, near Newcastle, via the Bristol Downs and Manningtree. With field recordings by Karen Hall, Tim Dowling, Stefan Taylor and Chris Watson.
Dec 13, 2020•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Take your ears on a binaural summer holiday through the Mallorcan town of Soller, from sunrise to sundown. The sleepy town awakes into market day, and tourists arrive at the Miro-decorated train station before climbing aboard the tram that runs through the town square down to the beach of Port de Soller. Night brings the local fiesta of St Bartomeu as the drums beat into the night in the town square.
Nov 29, 2020•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Composer Iain Chambers’s celebration of the domestic sound world, starting in the present day before travelling back in time. Lockdown gave us the excuse to consider our own home environments in a new way. Household Gods takes this new focus further, exploring in depth and amplifying the sounds of domestic objects, arranged into a through-composed musique concrète work. This is a joyful sonic celebration of the domestic environment, starting in the present day, and travelling back in time to exp...
Nov 01, 2020•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds - from the Flow Country of the Scottish Highlands to the Bristol Downs, via Chesil Beach and an East Sussex bluebell wood. With field recordings by Chris Watson, Timothy Dowling, Martin Handley, and Steve Urquhart.
Oct 18, 2020•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast With extraordinary close-up recordings of his life as a vet, the bird population, the wildlife, the sea and the shore, veterinarian Joe Hollins brings his time on the island of Tristan da Cunha to the ears of the Slow Radio listener. Joe has recorded over 20 hours of close encounters with wild life and domestic animals, and this Slow Radio piece will take the chance to really zoom in on the incredible richness of sounds which he has recorded here over six months. This is one of the most unique l...
Oct 04, 2020•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds - from the beaches and forests of Costa Rica, to the shores of Loch Ballygrant on the Isle of Islay. With field recordings by Les Pratt, Bronwen Buckeridge, Chris Watson, and Stephanie Lyons.
Sep 06, 2020•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds - including a Swedish forest, a Dorset dawn chorus, and water lapping the shores of Lough Erne in Northern Ireland.
Aug 02, 2020•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast A journey on the Flying Scotsman with privileged access to the driver on the footplate.
May 31, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Composer Iain Chambers takes a sound walk along Suffolk's River Deben, meeting avocets and curlew, and culminating in the musical sounds of Woodbridge boatyard.
May 03, 2020•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Have you ever wondered what goes bump in the woods at night? Hugh Huddy discovers the night time soundscape of a woodland in Suffolk by placing a binaural recording box in a tree and leaving it there overnight. Listening back to the recording, the secret life of the dark woods slowly reveals itself. Producer: Cathy Robinson for BBC Wales
Mar 29, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast An antidote to today’s frenzied world. Step back, let go, immerse yourself: it’s time to go slow. Listen to the sounds of birds, mountain climbing, monks chanting as you go about your day. A lo-fi celebration of pure sound.
Mar 22, 2020•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast An intimate, breath-close binaural portrait of the intoxicating Indian city of Mumbai.
Feb 23, 2020•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Writer and poet Susan Richardson invites us to a seal pupping beach on the Pembrokeshire coast; a world that has inspired tales of shape-shifting selkie folk and mermaids. We stand above a cove. The air is filled with the haunting cries of the grey seals below us, and a soap opera of their lives unfolds. Through the human-sounding calls of the pups, the grunts and splashes of the bull seals as they are looking to mate again, and the sea birds and lapping water, we're immersed in the sonic world ...
Feb 16, 2020•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast A montage of music and natural sounds including whale song and Tundra swans.
Feb 10, 2020•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast A montage of music and natural sounds including an Antarctic fur seal and her pup, Yellow-billed storks, and a Himalayan snowcock.
Jan 26, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Britain has lost 90% of its traditional orchards. So, seven years ago the villagers of Haselbury Plucknett planted a Somerset orchard: 35 cider apple trees, all old varieties with names as gorgeous as their colours - Kingston Black, Sweet Crimson King, Slack-me-Girdle. "Make sure a rainbow goes into your cider barrel," says Matthew Bryant, filling his bucket with windfalls. In the tin shed at the back of his house Bryant, the cider expert and author James Crowden and friends gather to turn apple...
Dec 22, 2019•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast A montage of music and natural sounds from the Abernethy Forest in the Scottish Highlands, coniferous woodland that is home to chaffinches, wren, willow warblers, mistle thrush, Scottish crossbills and more; we meet an Oscillated Turkey, native to the rainforests of Guatemala; we’ll warm your cockles with the sound of thermal mud pools at Poikili Hot Springs in Papua New Guinea; and from mud pools to marshland – we finish in Louisiana USA with the sound of cicadas and common grackles.
Dec 06, 2019•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds - from the chirping of nesting seabirds on a remote island to night-time in the marshes of Trinidad, sounds from the banks of a mighty Kenyan river and the waking dawn in the heart of Southern India.
Nov 10, 2019•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast A journey in sound across the lands intimately associated with Al-Andalus, medieval Moorish Spain and Portugal. Starting in Granada at the glorious Alhambra Palace, we hear the running water of the fountains that adorn the palace as well as the sound of modern day Andalusia, with flamenco singer Juan Pinilla. We then move to Alfama and Mouraria in the old Arab quarter of Lisbon, where we hear the melancholic melodies of fado, as well as the trams that transport both tourists and locals around th...
Nov 04, 2019•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1968 Redzi Bernard's mother arrived in Lalibela - Ethiopia's holy city - on a mule after an arduous trek through the mountains. Earlier this year Redzi recreated her mother's journey and when she arrived in Lalibela she discovered a timeless world. Just before dawn on a Sunday, she enters an church complex - all below ground level - where hundreds of pilgrims gather in white robes, incense burns, and drums and incantations fill the air. Ethiopian Orthodox priests lead ceremonies and devotees ...
Nov 03, 2019•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Think of the American South and one man-made sound plays out evocatively across the landscape: the horn of a passing freight train. For a century and a half it's been almost synonymous with the idea of America, particularly where the rural blends with the urban. In the city of Nashville, Tennessee - 'music city' - the last century has been accompanied by another signature sound: the honky tonk bar. In this leisurely half hour, we witness the musical arrival of a freight train as it crosses the p...
Oct 28, 2019•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast A montage of music and natural sounds from farmland in Somerset where willow warblers, robins and swallows merge with the faint chirp of crickets; a group of white rhinos going about their daily business in KwaZulu Natal; a troupe of busy white-throated Capuchin monkeys in a Costa Rican rainforest; and the ethereal call of the bellbird echoing through a forest in New Zealand.
Oct 18, 2019•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Renowned field recordist Chris Watson follows the sound of signal bells, and finds himself in a Gate Box on a stretch of the East Yorkshire railway, listening for trains and birds with signalman Dave Beckett.
Oct 13, 2019•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast A montage of music and natural sounds from a sunrise recorded in Cluny House Gardens in Perthshire; the call of a lyrebird captured in the eucalyptus trees of Hastings State Forest in southern Tasmania; a woodland in Minsmere, Suffolk where tawny owls, nightingales and cuckoos greet the early morning; and the mysterious hooting of a troupe of white-handed gibbons in Khao Yai National Park, Thailand.
Jul 25, 2019•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the fifth of five "slow-radio" walks in which writer Horatio Clare searches for Bach's footsteps - and his ghost - the route takes him from the village of Roseburg along the Old Salt Road to Mölln, and on to the city of Lübeck.
Jul 18, 2019•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Artist and cultural geographer Rob St John joins presenter Will Abberley on a walk through the Pennines, untangling the idea of the dark and unsettling impression of eeriness in the English landscape.
Jul 11, 2019•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dusk to dawn at the Isle of Wight Zoo. On the beautiful Sandown Beach on the Isle of Wight stands a historic fort, now home to the Isle of Wight Zoo. It is run by the Wildheart Trust, which promotes the survival of endangered species, and is well-known as a centre for rescued big cats who, along with pocket-sized primates and other even smaller animals have a starring role in this portrayal of the sounds of the zoo. The programme moves from dusk, as the animals prepare for sleep, through the sma...
Jul 05, 2019•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
