Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio & Modern Life. By Michael Guida

Abstract

Michael Guida’s book Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio & Modern Life is a fascinating account of how modes of listening to the natural world were configured in Britain between the First and Second World Wars. The book’s overarching thesis is that listening ‘brought nature closer’ (p. 12) to the everyday lives of ordinary British people between 1914 and 1935. To make his case, Guida has marshalled an impressive range of archival sources including poetry, newspapers, journals, films, and radio broadcasts. The literature on the history of sound, a sub-field of the wider study of sensory history, has until now focussed principally on urban modernity, especially in the work of Karin Bijsterveld, Emily Thompson and more recently in the British case, James Mansell. Guida, however, argues that ‘natural’ sounds, often romantically associated with rural England, performed an equally significant role in British culture during the 1920s and 1930s. These formed part of the sonic fabric of the modern world, even if they were often explicitly treated in direct contradistinction to the din of urban living. This tension—between nature’s association with tradition and the past, and listening experiences that presented nature in a ‘modern’ context—recurs across the book’s five chapters.