Free Thinking

What does zero carbon look like if you are planning a new housing development in your town. The UK’s building stock is one of the oldest in Europe, accounting for nearly 40% of the nation’s total carbon emissions, so how possible is it for our cities to cut them to zero before 2050?

Lecturer Lara Salinas explains how she has worked with local residents in the borough of Southwark in South London, encouraging them to take up zero carbon building design and retrofit. Professor Ljubomir Jankovic describes working with Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council, supporting their thinking about how housing developments could be built in future and how to build in net zero principles as part of the design process. New Generation Thinker Des Fitzgerald hosts the conversation.

Ljubomir Jankovic is Professor of Advanced Building at the University of Hertfordshire and leads the Zero Carbon Lab.

Lara Salinas is Lecturer in the Design School at London College of Communication and Senior Research Fellow in Knowledge Exchange at University of the Arts London.

Professor Des Fitzgerald is a New Generation Thinker who has co-written a book called The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City.

This New Thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. If you want to dig out other episodes you can find a collection called Green Thinking on the website of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme – there are discussions about a range of topics including climate justice, energy, trees and transport.

For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit: Responding to climate change – UKRI or follow @ahrcpress on twitter.

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Matthew Sweet gathers together four Proust fans from very different backgrounds - the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Jane Smiley, the psychotherapist, Jane Haynes, Christopher Prendergast, who has a translation of the book and written Living and Dying with Marcel Proust, and from France, the writer, Marie Darrieussecq. The actor Peter Marinker tackles the difficult task of giving an English voice to Proust.

The novel In Search of Lost Time is a modernist masterpiece which offers a symphonic account of what it meant to be alive in France as the 19th century became the 20th.

Producer: Zahid Warley

You can find a collection of programmes on the Free Thinking website exploring different aspects of modernism around the world https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxh

On Sunday Nov 20th at 5.30pm and for a month afterwards BBC Radio 3's curated selection of Words and Music inspired by the writing of Proust will be available on BBC Sounds.

Disillusionment with war and how you sue for peace are at the heart of Shaw's drama Arms and the Man, being staged in Richmond this autumn. Whilst in Bath a touring production of Mrs Warren's Profession stars Caroline Quentin and her daughter Rose Quentin as the former prostitute and her disapproving daughter. Anne McElvoy is joined by director Paul Miller, Professor Sos Eltis who has edited Shaw's work and theatre critic and writer Mark Lawson to look at Shaw's ability to construct arguments on stage and the resonances of his plays now.

Arms and the Man runs at the Orange Tree Theatre in London directed by Paul Miller from 19 November 2022 – 14 January 2023

Producer: Ruth Watts

You can find other Free Thinking conversations about drama past and present including discussions about Moliere, Ibsen, the playwright Rona Munro, John McGrath's Scottish drama, in a collection called Prose, Poetry and Drama https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh

It revolutionised domestic chores, signified modernity and has been made into packaging, textiles, electrical machinery but plastic has also contributed to our throw-away society. Clay is turned into bricks, cookware and used in industrial processes including paper making, cement production, and chemical filtering and increasingly contemporary artists are taking up the material. As exhibitions at the V&A Dundee and the Hayward Gallery in London display the different qualities and associations of these materials Lisa Mullen is joined by ceramic artist Lindsey Mendick, curators Cliff Lauson and Johanna Agerman Ross, and Kirsty Sinclair Dootson who studies materials in visual culture.

Plastic: Remaking Our World is at the V&A Dundee. It features product design, graphics, architecture and fashion from the collections of the V&A and Vitra Design Museum, and other collections. It is the first exhibition produced and curated by V&A Dundee, the Vitra Design Museum and maat, Lisbon, with curators from V&A South Kensington.

You can find a collection of programmes exploring Art, Architecture, Photography and Museums on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Do video games help explore war? An exhibition at the Imperial War Museum includes Sniper Elite 5, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and a military training simulator. For the 2022 discussion about how we look at warfare past and present Anne McElvoy is joined by writer & broadcaster Louise Blain, retired Colonel Lincoln Jopp, game designer Florent Maurin and IWM curator Chris Cooper.

War Games runs at IWM London until May 2023 and is a free exhibition.

You can find previous discussions available on BBC Sounds and downloadable as the Arts & Ideas podcast:

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The Scottish theologian and preacher John Knox died on 24th November 1572, bringing to an end a life packed with drama and controversy. Matthew Sweet is joined by historian Steven Reid, literary historian Lucy Hinnie and New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel to go through some of the most vivid and important episodes in that life, including his periods in exile, his highly antagonistic meetings with Mary Queen of Scots, and his time on the high seas as a prisoner forced to row a French galley. They also address the question of what makes Knox such an important figure and how his influence is still felt in Scotland today.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Putting I at the centre, the Ich, was the creed of philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte whilst Friedrich Schelling, saw the self as at one with the rest of nature: naturphilosophie. These competing ideas were debated in literary salons in the German town of Jena in the 1790s and Andrea Wulf's new biography Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self tells this story. She joins Anne McElvoy alongside New Generation Thinker Dr Seán Williams and the musicologist and Classical music biographer, Stephen Walsh, author of The Beloved Vision: Music in the Romantic Age.

Producer: Ruth Watts

This edition features discussion of music inspired by the Jena writers and extracts of:

Franz Schubert, “Gretchen am Spinnrade” sung by Bernarda Fink (soprano) with Gerold Huber (piano), Harmonia Mundi, HMC901991

Weber, Der Freischütz, Rundfunkchor Leipzig, Staatskapelle Dresden, Carlos Kleiber

You can find other programmes exploring German culture and thinking in the Free Thinking archives and available to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts including

King of Asia and Pharoah are two of the titles taken by Alexander, ruler of Macedonia from 336 B.C. to 323 B.C. He died aged 32 having conquered a vast area and founded the city of Alexandria in present day Egypt but his reputation stretched even further as a kind of philosopher king, and in myths and stories, as someone who travelled to paradise, created the first flying machine and explored underwater. Rana Mitter has been to visit a new exhibition at the British Library which illustrates these different images of Alexander and he's joined by New Generation Thinkers Dr Julia Hartley, Professor Islam Issa and by Peter Toth, curator of ancient and medieval manuscripts at the British Library. Plus we hear about the books on the shortlist of this year's Cundill History Prize from the chair of the judges, Professor J.R. McNeill.

Julia Hartley teaches on French, Italian, and Iranian art and literature at King's College London . You can find an Essay she wrote for Radio 3 on Alexander and the Persians available on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016rpp

The Cundill History prize has shortlisted the following books (the winner is announced on December 1st) https://www.cundillprize.com/

Producer: Ruth Watts.

You can hear an episode of Radio 3's Words and Music on the theme of Egypt co-curated by New Generation Thinker Islam Issa available on BBC Sounds for a month after being broadcast on Sunday November 6th at 5.30pm. And an episode of Free Thinking available now on BBC Sounds and as an Arts & Ideas podcast explores Dead Languages and the deciphering of hieroglyphics.

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough takes a look at the latest research shaping our understanding of the great Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf. She’ll be finding out about the insights that digital approaches are bringing to the tale of gold-hoarding dragons, sword-wielding heroes and murderous fenland beasties. We discover what video games and grammar have to tell us about Old English literature.

Andrew Burn Andrew Burn is Professor of English, Media and Drama at University College London’s Institute of Education. He is director of ReMap a research centre that focuses on media arts, creative practice and play and games. He has published work on many aspects of the media, including young people's production of digital animation, film and computer games. Further information about his research can be found at: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=ANBUR40 and www.andrewburn.org.

Roxanne Taylor is a research student at the University of Manchester where she is completing her PhD. She is working on an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project on argument structure and genitive modification in Old English noun phrases.

Beowulf Retold is on Radio 3 on Sunday 30th October and is available on BBC Sounds for the following 28 days.

This podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI.

Producer: Ruth Watts

The director and writer of Ghostwatch Lesley Manning and Stephen Volk join Matthew Sweet and academic Lucy Arnold to look back at the reality–horror/pseudo-documentary TV, which aired on British tv screens on Halloween night 1992. The BBC switchboard received an estimated 1,000,000 phone calls on the night of the broadcast and it has never been repeated on British tv although it is now part of a BFI season exploring horror.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

A BFI Horror season In Dreams are Monsters is running at venues across the UK until 31 December 2022 with screenings and events themed around the vampire, the ghost, the zombie, the witch and the beast.