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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: The Five Photographs that (You Didn't Know) Changed Everything

The Essay: The Five Photographs that (You Didn't Know) Changed Everything: Episode 4: The Broom Cottages

The Broom Cottages

Episode 4

Episode 4: The Broom Cottages

The Five Photographs that (You Didn't Know) Changed Everything

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, The Five Photographs that (You Didn't Know) Changed Everything, The Broom CottagesClose menu

Elizabeth Edwards on W Jerome Harrison's photo of the Broom cottages in Warwickshire.

Elizabeth Edwards discusses W Jerome Harrison's photo of the Broom cottages in Warwickshire, which began the mass participation of people in defining what matters about the past.

You won't find this photograph in a glossy coffee table book. It's not art and the person who took it doesn't feature in the Photographers Hall of Fame. But this picture has had an enormous impact on the way Britain sees what has come to be known as its cultural heritage.

The man who took the photo, W. Jerome Harrison, launched a scheme for recording the country's past in which amateur photographers up and down the land took pictures of the buildings which were important them. Wiki-buildings and English Heritage do this now on a much grander scale. But Elizabeth Edwards argues that the mass participation of people in defining what matters about the past began with Harrison, and changed the way in which a nation viewed itself.

Elizabeth Edwards is Research Professor of Photographic History and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Producer: Rosie Dawson.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Series focusing on historically important yet little-known photographs

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Episode 4: The Broom Cottages

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