Hamble Peninsula Sounds

Hamble Peninsula Sounds - Website Photo

Funded by Developer’s Contributions for Public Art, Eastleigh Borough Council is commissioning Wild Museum to build a sound archive for Bursledon, Hamble and Hound.

Following on from the Hamble Peninsula Trails project led by local creative collaboration People Place Nature Ltd, Hamble Peninsula Sounds aims to engage local residents in the creation of a high-quality sound archive which responds to the history, culture and biodiversity of the area.

Between now and September 2024, Wild Museum will be creating audio recordings that explore and interpret the area’s past, present and future. This could be everything from its seasonal wildlife, conversations with residents, 300 year old sea shanties, to sounds from Hamble airfield.

Wild Museum are a team of artists and sound recordists who work all over the world, and regularly broadcast on BBC radio & television.

How can you get involved?

Wild Museum will involve local communities in the development of this sound archive. There are lots of ways to get involved, including:

  • Recommending sites, locations and stories you feel are of interest
  • Learn about audio recording, particularly of the natural world
  • Having a conversation with us that we can record

We want to speak with groups and individuals of all ages. You don’t need experience of sound recording or arts projects. You could be a school class, community group, amateur historian, wildlife enthusiast or interested resident.

Contact John Coburn john@wild-museum.com if you might be interested.

Also, keep an eye out for forthcoming events on Eastleigh Borough Council’s website, in the Borough News e-newsletter and on social media.

Let’s meet the team…

John Coburn is an arts and heritage producer whose work inspires diverse communities to explore and understand the multi-layered social, historical and environmental identities of place. As Director of Wild Museum he has led a range of projects supported by Arts Council England and Historic England and worked with partners including the British Library and National Trust. John also co-owns and co-manages an ancient woodland where he leads arts programmes that build public engagement with place, biodiversity & heritage.

For Hamble Peninsula Sounds John will lead the overall development of the archive, ensuring there is a blend of recordings that explore a range of sites and subjects. John will also create recordings that explore the change and constancy of the area through interviews with older residents, young people, tourists, shop owners, and subject specialists including local history groups.

Dr Tim Shaw is a leading artist and researcher working with sound and new media, and presents work through performances, installations, walks and site-responsive interventions. Tim’s artworks, recordings and writings have been featured in The Guardian, Arte Tracks, Neural, BBC Radio 3, Resonance FM, We Make Money Not Art and Touch Radio. He is a Senior Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Zurich, and is co-curator of the Walking Festival of Sound.

For this project, Tim will invite groups to take part in sound walks, listening closely to the natural environments of the peninsula including marshland, mudflats, marine life and underwater ecosystems. Tim is also interested in connecting with local HAM radio clubs.

Rose Ferraby is an archaeologist and artist currently based in North Yorkshire. Her work explores the relationship between people and landscape through time. Her work has been commissioned by the British Museum and English Heritage and her writing and broadcasting has featured on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, including The Essay and Open Country.

Rose’s work on the Hamble Peninsula will reflect a journey around the waterways, dipping above and below the surface, and encountering different people along the way. Rose wants to meet people involved with fishing and operating boats for work or leisure, to build multi-layered stories exploring the wrecks and waterways.

Jennifer Reid is a researcher, musician and performer of nineteenth century dialect and

Victorian broadside ballads. She completed an Advanced Diploma in Local History at Oxford University and her work has taken her to Venice, Croatia, New York and Bangladesh.

Jennifer plays the character of Barb in Shane Meadows’ period drama The Gallows Pole, and she has recently supported Pulp and John Cooper Clarke.

For Hamble Peninsula Sounds, Jennifer will capture social history by exploring music, stories and dialect. She is especially interested in sea shanties and the heritage of labour and migration, waterways and rural life.

Chris Watson was a founding member of the influential Sheffield based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Since then he has developed a particular and passionate interest in recording the wildlife sounds of animals and habitats from around the world. Chris’s television work includes many programmes in the David Attenborough ‘Life’ series and he won BAFTAs for sound recording on ‘The Life of Birds’ in 1996 and the BBC series ‘Frozen Planet’ in 2012.

For this project, Chris will focus on capturing sounds in the Upper Hamble Estuary and woods, along the River Hamble and at the Mercury Marshes.