Grumbling

Pleased as punch to have this little audio piece featured as the artists project in Issue 70 of Cabinet Magazine: the New York based magazine of art and culture.

I was approached by artist and writer Sally O’Reilly who was guest editing an edition interrogating the Webster’s Timeline History series – a preposterous collection of 90,000 publications that each collate material scraped from the internet under different search terms. Sally invited me to choose an edition and produce something in response. ‘Grumbling: 415BC -2007’ appealed for its ridiculousness and audio potential. And yet a trawl through the contents revealed some fascinating historical trends.

I built the piece around entries to do with: grumbling against oppressive power relations, culminating in revolution; sermonizing against grumbling in the 1850s and 1860s; grumbling winds in wonderfully sonic late-nineteenth-century storm scenes; and grumbling as a precursor to regime change in early twenty-first-century news reports. I read out excerpts from these entries and then added some grumbly ambient audio, including (for part 1) a recording I made of bees inside a local bee hive.

Saturday in Burgess Park

This 6 minute feature tells the story of my local park in South East London.

I made it after a fascinating day recording there with binaural microphones. Essentially these are headsets that record what is happening around you through microphones in either ear. Unlike recordings made using one microphone or even a hand-held stereo microphone, these give you the slightly uncanny feeling of being in the centre of the action – provided you listen with headphones.

© Rosie Oliver 2025. Voice, words, recordings, music and image all my own.

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Shortlisted for an International Women’s Podcast Award!

Shortlisted for an International Women’s Podcast Award!
Shortlisted for an International Women’s Podcast Award!

Thrilled to bits that Women in Revolt! has been shortlisted for an International Women’s Podcast Award! We’re in the category ‘Moment of Insight from a Role Model’ for Rita Keegan’s inspiring account of her involvement with Brixton Art Gallery and the importance of ‘putting yourself in the picture’ when as a woman and as a person of colour you are erased from history (Episode 5, from 2:18 – 11:15)

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Interviewing Women in Revolt!

Interviewing Women in Revolt!


I’m super excited to be producing a podcast series for the Women in Revolt! exhibition opening at Tate Britain in November. The show will be all about about Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement in the UK, 1970-1990. My job gives me the huge privilege of interviewing some truly remarkable and inspiring women (like the performance artist Shirley Cameron, pictured) whose groundbreaking work has been largely overlooked and undervalued.

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Lewisham’s lost gay pubs

I grew up in Lewisham borough in the 70s and 80s but knew nothing of the thriving LGBT pub scene there. So it was a real adventure to find out all about it from former regulars and bar staff. The emerging picture was wonderfully colourful, delightfully grubby, at times hilarious but also profoundly moving. It became obvious that what was going on locally in Lewisham was part of a much bigger story about finding community; supporting each other through tough times; pubs as safe spaces away from prejudice and hate; and what we lost when those – and so many other – pubs closed.

I wove the interviews together to create this 2-part podcast. It was commissioned by Bijou Stories and made as part of In Living Memory: A People’s History of Post-War Lewisham.

Elocution lessons

Here’s a social history gem I uncovered while interviewing three siblings for a Spoken Portrait about their childhood. To set the scene, it’s the 1950s, they’re living in a south London suburb and the youngest child (the brother) is about 6 years old. Enjoy!

Vondelpark Beats: sonic postcard

I just spent a week dog sitting in Amsterdam, by the Vondelpark. As I took the dogs on their walks I enjoyed how we synched up our paces: three dog steps to my one. I then started to notice the other beats around me – from the ticking kitchen clock where I was staying, to the cycles, birds, dogs and traffic crossing blips. I took my field recorder one of our walks to capture those sounds for this little ‘sonic postcard’. Think of it a bit like a piece of music, four beats per bar.

My sound of 2021: Bow Bells ringing out after lockdown

If 2020 was all about lockdown and fear, then 2021 for me was all about release and hope. Of course, the pandemic is not over yet and controls may be needed for years. But with vaccines available (here in the UK, at least), it was a year when we could cautiously re-enter the world and reactivate our cities.

This is a recording of six of the bells at St Mary Le Bow church (also known as the ‘Bow Bells’) ‘ringing up’ before embarking on a quarter peal at the City of London’s Festival of Bells on 31 July 2021. The purpose of the ‘ringing up’ was to raise the bells from hanging loose mouth down, to being brought to balance up like a cup in readiness for change ringing.

I found the enveloping sound so powerful and moving: like an ecstatic release from the dull sadness of lockdown.

The pandemic had left the City eerily quiet. Not only had it been abandoned by commuters and tourists; but bell ringers had also stayed away due to the danger of Covid contagion in cramped bell towers (I’ve written more about this in Chiming During the Pandemic which was my sound of 2020). The Festival of Bells 2021 was promoted as a celebration of London reopening. It took place soon after the last legal restrictions were lifted and people could return to offices. The aim was to get as many of the City’s bells to ring as possible. One of the organisers, Trisha Shannon, told me how she had started the day unlocking bell towers, resetting stopped wall clocks and taking down calendars hanging open at March 2020.

St Mary Le Bow was the first church to perform change ringing that day; and by extension also the first since the start of the pandemic. There’s a famous saying that to be a true Londoner you have to be born within earshot of Bow Bells. It’s why I think of the bell tower as the sonic centre of London. And it’s why the sound felt to me like a reactivation of the City’s soundscape from its heart.

Remembering (Aldeburgh beach)

I spent the close of 2021 with my parents in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. I went out onto the beach one windy evening to experiment with my new contact microphone. This piece includes sounds from a fish-hut flagpole and Maggi Hamblin’s ‘Scallop’ – a giant steel scallop shell sculpture bearing the words ‘I hear those voices that will not be drowned’ from Britten’s Peter Grimes opera. I’ve combined them with piano riffs I recorded a while ago.

I’ve been visiting Aldeburgh since I was a child and the beach holds so many memories for me. Not so much of events; more of states of being alone there. I’ve tried to capture something of that here.

Rebel Dykes: a podcast and a journey

It has been an immense joy to work on ‘Rebel Dykes: the podcast’ these past few months. It’s a one-off feature about a remarkable community of outsider lesbians living in London in the 1980s, the work of amazing film-makers and curators to present this lost history, and why this all matters so much. (Now also available on Spotify!)

I was approached by Paul Green about producing something back in June. He had recently launched Bijou Stories: a project to create a LGBTQ+ history through collaborations between artists and communities. He had seen the Rebel Dykes documentary film at BFI Flare in March and was blown away by it. When I saw it, so was I! It’s a marvellously entertaining punk portrait of dykes living outside mainstream society and disapproved of by other feminists and lesbians. It appealed to my own rebellious streak and felt startlingly fresh and inspiring. (If you haven’t yet seen it, you must! It’s currently on general release and available on BFI player.)

Paul and I met with Siobhan Fahey, the woman behind the Rebel Dykes history project and the producer of the film. She had also been wanting to commission a podcast, so we agreed to make it a joint production.

The challenge for me was to produce something significantly distinct from the film which depicts the 80s Rebels so brilliantly (and has gone on to win multiple awards). Instead, I focused on the fact that this was a community whose stories might have been lost. That was the reason why Paul had developed Bijou Stories. And it’s what had originally motivated Siobhan – herself an 80s Rebel Dyke – who had been astonished that their history seemed to be being overlooked by academics and film-makers. 

It also turned out to be the driving force behind the Rebel Dykes art and archive show held in London’s Gallery Space Station 65 over the summer. As Atalanta Kernick, one of the co-curators, said to me:

I believe that lesbians we’re separated from our own history, culture and iconography. And if you don’t know where you’ve come from, it’s hard to know where you’re going.

Her words rang so true when I spent two days in the gallery interviewing visitors. Many of the younger people knew nothing of the stories and imagery from the 80s. In fact, some had never spoken to an older lesbian before (yes, really). I was privileged to be able to capture their powerful, moving responses to the exhibition and their sense of relief and excitement at seeing imagery of people like themselves.

Working on the podcast and interviewing people (Siobhan, the film directors, exhibition curators, visitors and artists) was an incredible journey for me.  I learned so much not only about the 80s Rebels (including fabulous stories that are not in the film) and the rich body of art from that period; but also about the new generation of Rebel Dyke artists (yes, the rebel spirit lives on!); about how three people who had never made a feature film managed to produce something so good in their spare time with no funding; about the challenges of curating a massively ambitious show during lockdown; about how the gaping hole in lesbian representation in films and exhibitions affects us all; and about how meaningful it is to discover the stories, history, culture and imagery of your people. It’s all in the podcast – and more!

There was something very healing and uplifting about the gallery show, where I spent a lot of time over the summer. It served both as a mirror on an under-represented community, and as a space where lesbians and queers of all ages could congregate and make new friends. And after the isolation of lockdown it’s what we all so badly needed.

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