A living archive for our generation and the ones to follow

The conversation moves through a 1980s Balsall Heath childhood, where neighbours came from Yemen, Kashmir, Jamaica and Ireland and a real sense of community sat right alongside crime and a red-light reputation. Lyle and Carl trace how music runs through everything he does, talk candidly about living with ADHD and the crashes that follow its…

Two people who both love oral history talk about why ordinary voices belong in the record. Siobhan describes the Birmingham Museums project bringing the city's sound archive out of storage and back to the communities who made it, and the part she likes best, playing old recordings to groups and watching them find where their…

Carl and Karamat share a love of history and use it to open up Kashmir's story: how the British sold the land and its people for 75,000 rupees in 1846, why migration to Birmingham, Bradford and Luton runs back more than a century, and what partition did to the villages around Mirpur. Karamat speaks about…