Free listening room on the British Library's Lower Ground Floor with curator-picked recordings from its sound and video archive.
The Sound Gallery is open at the British Library on the Lower Ground Floor, near the cloakroom. It's a listening point into the library's sound and video archive, which holds more than seven million recordings. Staff and guest curators hand-pick selections from across that reach, so you can sample everything from birdsong to beatbox.
The archive covers a lot of ground. You'll find music, poetry and prose, oral history, accents and dialects, and natural sounds. The curators pull from across the whole collection, so the recordings change over time. It's a way to hear a small slice of what's held in the vaults without needing to know exactly what you're looking for.
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The room is open during the building's regular opening hours and is step-free. It's supported by the American Trust for the British Library. Entry is free and no booking is required, so you can just drop in whenever you're around the building.
