The "Singing" Walls of BBC Bush House

My last couple of posts have been a little bit negative but this post is positive. And also a bit weird.

Ask people in the ex-colonial world what they know about Britain and most of them will say BBC World Service. Until recently, the headquarters could be found in Bush House – appropriately named for a service set up to communicate to colonial Brits living in "the Bush".

For 70 years, radio has been recorded, edited and broadcast by men and women who walked the resonant staircases, who chatted in the lift and who could be heard striding down the corridors. Sadly, the BBC World Service said "Goodbye" to Bush House in 2012 and moved to their new home in the just as beautiful Broadcasting House. 

No doubt this was an emotional time for the people who worked here and some tried to preserve aspects of the building for future generations. There's a brilliant radio show from BBC Radio 3 in which people who worked in Bush House walk through the now empty rooms and remember the happy times that they spent there. One such person goes by the mysterious name of Robin The Fog. Working as a Studio Manager in Bush House, Robin The Fog spent many nights editing alone.

In the early hours one night, so his story goes, while alone in the basement Robin The Fog found the BBC’s old tape-to-tape recorders. After dusting them off, he set about recording the sounds of the building such as the lift mechanism; the empty, resonant stairwell; and old continuity announcements. After transposing these recordings to tape, he slowed or sped up certain sounds, distorting them. The tape was allowed to degrade and echoes were made possible by playing the sound and looping it back onto the tape.

He had created The Ghosts of Bush, a weird and haunting album. Listening to this, it’s hard not to imagine the empty, cold and dark spaces in a sleeping Bush House.

Robin The Fog has said of this work:

These are the sounds the building makes when it thinks no-one is listening, the sounds of many sleepless nights spent isolated in a labyrinthine basement surrounding by a crepuscular soundtrack of creaks and crackles. It’s an attempted homage to the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who crafted the most incredible of sound-worlds from the most basic of sources. But mostly it’s my way of saying goodbye to a building that I and so many people have loved.

I agree, what better way of saying goodbye to a building so involved recording the voices of others than to record its voice for all to remember.