A collaboration with young artists from Lewes Priory and Seaford Head Schools, in partnership with Archaeology South East, UCL, Writing Our Legacy and The Lewes Green Huts Project. Connecting to the history of architecture, landscape and colonisation through listening.
In July 2025 I spent some time at the Lewes Green Huts with students from Lewes Priory and Seaford Head Schools leading a collaborative project with Archaeology South East (UCL). I'd been drawn to the huts a year earlier after seeing an atmospheric photo on Instagram and experiencing a familiar sensation of needing to hear it, my ears tuning in trying to pull sound from the image, wondering what the decrepit space with the strange dusty light, nearing the end of its life, sounded like.
The two huts are prefabricated structures originating in Seaford's WWI training camp as a single chapel before travelling by train to Lewes to house Gorringes Auctions. At this stage I knew nothing about the history but thanks to local artist Marco Crivello I was able to spend a day listening to and recording the quiet but unique tones of these prefab buildings.
I spent 6 hours listening to structural creaks, thin corrugated walls activated by encroaching nature, and the disorientating, engulfing rumble and screeching of trains arriving and departing at Lewes Station, whose announcements from platforms just metres from the back of the huts would catch me out as I turned to see where the disembodied voices were coming from.
The gavel’s sharp wooden crack, a ‘sound mark’ heard thousands of times here in the hut’s auction house period, activates the acoustics.
I played objects left behind by the auctioneers, including a small bell, performing slow sliding movements along an abandoned glass tabletop. I lowered microphones through jagged holes in the flooring and recorded the rotting and uninviting toilets dripping and the resonant pings of strip lights clicking and flickering to life.
This initial session led to finding out more about the history of the soon to be demolished huts and the development of a collaborative project with Archaeology South East that invited students from Lewes and Seaford to connect with the original location and current home, and to learn about their history and colonial legacy through deep listening and experimenting with sound, space and architecture.
From the Western Front Association website -
The two huts, once a single structure, were a church for soldiers camped at Seaford training to fight in WW1. They are the only building still in existence which was used by the thousands of Black soldiers from the Caribbean – the British West Indies Regiment, or BWIR - who volunteered to fight in 1915 and came to do their training here.
Following Neolithic Cannibals, a sound project and collaboration with young people from Whitehawk, the council estate where I grew up, I was interested in how I could develop and expand this approach at the Lewes Green Huts. That project had engaged listening, archaeology and place to explore the Neolithic and contemporary landscape and the class divide in education, arts and wider society. What might we discover by listening to the atmosphere and sounding the structure, fabric and materials of the Green Huts?
Sound moves through the air.
Sound moves through matter.
Sound moves through us.
Sound moves us.
The workshops included input from archaeologists Jon Sygrave who talked about migration in deep time, Sarah Wolferstan who guided students in geographical and historical research, and Claire Allen who shared sounds from Jamaica and talked about what listening to those sounds of home mean to her. Architecture archaeologist Michael Shapland shared his work documenting the life and death of a building, storyteller Akila Richards from Writing Our Legacy guided deep grounding and storytelling activities and hut custodian Edwina Livesey shared her knowledge around the building's use during WWI.
Akila invites us to lean and push against the structure, connecting. We play the building. We honor and witness the space and those that passed through it by listening.
Throughout the workshops, we placed listening at the centre of our practice. In his book The Poetics of Listening, Brandon LaBelle describes this kind of listening as a position rather than an act -
It is in this way that listening is a broader form of sensing. It gathers the senses together, compiling them into ways of noticing and also ways of thinking and relating. Importantly, it draws the imagination forward in terms of feeling beyond the senses, giving way to a unique form of knowing and intuiting.
In Sonic Migration, one activity invited students to listen to photographs of WWI soldiers, asking: 'What do you hear?' This simple shift - from the usual primacy of vision to active listening - encouraged slower, deeper engagement with the images and fostered greater connection to the lives and experiences of those who travelled so far from home to serve in the British military.
We work slowly and carefully to record the walls and objects inside. They'll be gone soon.
The creative and practical sound-making activities such as playing the building with percussion beaters or brushes and making soundscapes, enact the imagination and curiosity in new ways, but just as important are the reflections and conversations listening invites around sometimes uncomfortable history and experiences. The benefits of placing listening at the centre of these sessions extend to mental health and wellbeing, listening to ourselves and others and connecting with the wider world in more sensitive ways.
On the exterior wall layers of cracked and bubbling paint pressed and pressured, relent and give in to the force. On the other side of the corrugated iron, a teacher notices those percussive pops activating the dusty acoustics of the hut.
We travelled from Lewes to Seaford by train using special ‘electromagnetic’ microphones to reveal hidden sounds of the journey. In Seaford we explored the original location of the huts close to the exposed and blustery coast and learnt about the experiences of soldiers here over 100 years ago.
At Seaford Head School, we knew the WWI military camps had been located somewhere in the area and we roamed the corridors and classrooms with microphones, recording the contemporary sonic details within this historical landscape.
The coastal wind blows through and activates high fencing around Seaford Head School. We take turns using special ‘contact’ microphones that reveal hidden vibrations in the structure - listening to eerie howling, imagining that it's the camp huts on a stormy day.
In a classroom an electronic synthesiser pattern bubbles and loops in the background, as students become engrossed in confirming whether one of the World War One military camps was on or very close to the site of the school. A student performs a range of electronic textures and patterns, creating an evolving soundtrack for the geographical and historical research taking place nearby.
Back at the huts we created a pop-up, multi-speaker sound installation - the kind of experience usually reserved for galleries with expensive equipment - using nothing but mobile phones positioned around the space, some hidden, some outside, low and high. The phones played back audio textures and materials gathered by the students and we moved slowly around the hut listening to them. The uncertain location of sounds led my ears to play tricks, to hear phantom sounds. I found myself curious, peering into voids, looking for the source of a half-heard sound.
This and further audio material gathered and created during the workshops was edited and sequenced into a 20-minute loop (available to hear at the top of the page) and shared publicly in the huts on a multi-loudspeaker system where audiences were invited to move around and explore the space whilst listening to the recorded sounds blur with live atmosphere. The invitation to explore in a different way, with the recorded structural sounds magnified and amplified, created an intimate and contemplative experience.
From the workshops to the public sharing event, listening created a safe or softer space to learn about the soldiers who used the huts and about the colonial history that is often hidden and unheard just beneath the surface of these stories. I've been calling this experience listening beyond sound - a phrase I possibly read somewhere else or maybe came up with. By this I mean listening as an invitation to curiosity, to a quieter form of connection that leaves space for uncertainty, for not needing all the answers or to pin everything down. A malleable and spacious container that holds new possibilities for discovery and learning.
I want to end by sharing some words from artist Pauline Oliveros, whose Deep Listening writing and work informs my own practice and explorations in sound. This quote hung in the Neolithic Cannibals gallery and describes the often overlooked, or should I say underheard power of listening and being heard -
I recognised that being heard is a step toward being understood.
Being understood is a step toward being healed.
Understanding is a step toward building a community.
Sonic Migration was a collaboration with young artists from Lewes Priory and Seaford Head Schools, in partnership with Archaeology South East, UCL, Writing Our Legacy and The Lewes Green Huts Project.
Funded through the AHRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) award to UCL
