Bureau of Lost Culture

Join our Patreon HERE --- Britain has always been home to people who live differently. Romani Gypsies, Irish Travellers, Showmen/women who carry the fairgrounds from town to town, families who made their homes on the waterways, and, more recently, the New Age Travellers who emerged from the 70s counterculture, the free festival movement and the rave scene.   Today that tradition continues in new f...

If you're going to watch your local football team this weekend, or perhaps catch a big match on a TV screen in the pub, do you know that you may be unconsciously participating in an ancient ritual? And as you're shouldering your way to the bar from the mosh pit at some gig and grinning at those you pass, are you aware that the artist you were watching may be embodying some spirit of transformation...

For centuries, it seems Britain’s magic mushrooms remained hidden in plain sight—growing in fields, parks, and hillsides. When knowledge of them did emerge, it passed between people through rumours, oral testimony, underground publications, and increasingly, reports of court cases. Robert Dickens of The Psychedelic Press came to the Bureau to tell the extraordinary story of the Psilocybe Pickers:...

Has 20th-and 21st-century physics moved away from the brute materialism of the nineteenth century toward ideas that resemble the world’s ancient mystical traditions? Might many of the discipline’s greatest figures — Einstein, Niels Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer and others - have been privately motivated by philosophical and sometimes mystical questions about consciousness, reality and...

She's 82 but is firing on all cylinders, still crazy after all these years, as Paul Simon sang, well, still crazy enough to believe the world can be changed for the better, that it's her duty to try to make that happen and crazy enough in her youth to try to levitate the Pentagon.   Born into a communist family in Brooklyn, NANCY KURSHAN was involved in Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War protests w...

There are some images that don’t simply record history—they change it. On the morning of 11 June 1963, at a busy crossroads in Saigon, Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk, calmly sat down in the lotus position while fellow monks poured petrol over his robes. He struck a match and, as the flames engulfed him, he remained perfectly still.   The Associated Press photographer Malcolm Browne captured the...

Roc Sanford is a British writer, artist and climate activist whose life has been a countercultural journey from an alternative childhood through academia to a remarkable experiment in off-grid living and ecological resistance as a catalyser for Extinction Rebellion and Ocean Rebellion.   For more than three decades he has been associated with the remote Hebridean island of Gometra, where he lives...

In the company of historian of drugs, MIKE JAY, we journey back to the first psychedelic age - not the 1960s, but the 1790s, when Britain was at the forefront, at the frontier, of gonzo psychedelic science.  We explore the world of the 'Pneumatic Institution' in Bristol,  a community of scientists, poets, philosophers, and industrial entrepreneurs who formed a kind of proto-counterculture led by t...

Ever thought the so-called ‘golden decade’ of the 1960s was only about peace and love? Think again. Beneath the surface, it was riddled with violence, paranoia, and chaos, even in its most iconic moments.   So says James Riley, a writer whose work explores the darker edges of late-1960s and 1970s counterculture. His 'The Bad Trip' is an acclaimed study of apocalypse, occultism, paranoia and the co...

This is the second part of our conversation with Joe Rush , the initiator, mentor, and driving force behind The Mutoid Waste Company , that extraordinary countercultural endeavour to turn the waste of our industrial civilisation into art, performance, street theatre - and a way of life. If you haven’t heard the first part, you might want to start here: https://bureauoflostculture.podbean.com/e/20t...

The Weather Underground, The Baader-Meinhof Group, The Red Brigade, Carlos the Jackal, The Japanese Red Army. The counterculture has always had a shadow side. There have been bad actors, casualties, the needle and the damage done -  and in this episode, we dive into the world of revolutionary and political violence, exploring how radical groups emerged from countercultural movements and evolved in...

Beyond the official story, the myth, of the Second World War — its maps and medals, courage and sacrifice — there is another hidden narrative. Written in rare memoirs, or in letters and diaries never meant to be read by us, it tells of a kind of underground culture that was secret, transgressive, forbidden With millions of young men and women on military service, the transitory nature of life unde...

If you had been at the Glastonbury Festival in 1987,  you may have seen a familiar silhouette emerging in the dawn light  - upright monoliths arranged in a circle. Was it Stonehenge - magically transferred here across the Salisbury plain? No, it was ‘Carhenge'- a circle of upright cars, their chassis standing like monoliths, the archaeology of the automobile age And imagine ‘Tankhenge', a gateway...

In the heart of London’s Bloomsbury, behind a scruffy turquoise door, the world lies folded into drawers. Here are maps that survived wars, regimes, and revolutions — not because they were valued, but because they were forgotten.   Some were reused when paper was scarce - a map of Cuba mounted on the reverse of a Second World War map of Berlin, the roads of one ruined city shining faintly through...

This is the second part of a conversation with Alaura O’Dell / Mistress Mix, formerly known as Paula P-Orridge. In the first part, we traced Alaura’s journey from meeting the musician and cultural provocateur Genesis P-Orridge, as a 15-year-old schoolgirl in East London, to becoming a central actor in the underground art band Psychic TV and the occult network Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). ...

Over the last century, the word Shaman has been embraced by artists, hippies, psychonauts and spiritual rebels. In the 1960s and 70s, shamanism had become a kind of countercultural shorthand for altered states, secret, magical knowledge, and ways of seeing outside rationalism, capitalism, and institutional power. Shamans appeared in underground books, on psychedelic record sleeves, in communes and...

This is the second part of a conversation with the poet, musician and thinker Penny Rimbaud, co-founder, with Steve Ignorant, of the anarcho-punk band and activist art collective Crass   Crass emerged as a band in 1977, but quickly became something more complex, rejecting rock stardom, record industry norms, releasing records on their own label and using their platform to challenge war, nationalis...

The sea, its myths, and the supernatural is the theme of this special New Year edition of the Bureau when we leave behind our usual waters to set sail into the past of a very unusual counterculture.   For most of human history, the sea has been both a road and a riddle. It promises fortune and freedom — but it also swallows ships whole. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Britain’s...

In early 1990s South London — a time when rave culture was mutating and London’s squats were pulsing with creativity, Aphex Twin, Global Communication, Nightmares on Wax, Autechre,Andrea Parker, Scanner — could be found DJ-ing and performing in spaces where a strange new sound-world was blooming. This is the story of Telepathic Fish, the ambient afterparty scene created by the Openmind Collective....

There are figures in counterculture whose names appear only in the margins of the story — whose influence is eclipsed, overshadowed, even dismissed, by more mythologised personalities. Alaura O’Dell — known to many under her earlier name, Paula P-Orridge - is a musician, artist, occult practitioner, and was a co-conspirator in the band Psychic TV For a long time, Alaura was described almost exclus...

We are on the brink of a new nuclear age - the energy crisis, the push towards net zero and the gargantuan power requirements of AI demand it - or so we are told.     But here in Britain, the old nuclear age isn’t just a historical footnote - it’s etched into the very landscape.   Tom Bolton went on an epic journey around the UK to explore the extraordinary, imposing locations in that landscape, f...

When the filmmaker David Lynch died earlier this year, fans created shrines filled with coffee, doughnuts, cigarettes and blue roses; a level of spontaneous mourning more common for dead rock stars or royalty than filmmakers. His auctioned belongings sold for staggering sums, almost as if they were relics, showing how many people felt deeply connected to his work. Why? David was that unusual figur...

Penny Rimbaud , who has spent more than half a century living the ideals that most of us only talk about, has been described as an activist philosopher, an anarchist, a Zen Buddhist. Though he would likely not recognise those descriptions, he is certainly a poet, a musician, an artist. Born Jeremy John Ratter in 1943, in the late 1960s, together with artist Gee Vaucher, he founded Dial House, an o...

We walk the streets every day — and through parks, across squares and pavements and along beaches, and mountains, over 'The Commons' — without much thought for who really owns them. These apparently public spaces have often been battlegrounds over public rights. From the rural enclosures that fenced off England’s open fields, through the city squares where protesters have clashed with police, to t...

As musician and activist BILLY BRAGG makes a welcome return as a voice of countercultural sanity, we revisit the Lost History of Skiffle as he takes us on an extraordinary whirlwind tour through the music that the counterculture forgot.   Along the way, we hear about the emergence of The Teenager in post-war Britain, the massive impact of Rock Around the Clock, the Soho espresso bar culture of the...