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History

Bureau of Lost Culture

by Stephen Coates
HistorySociety & Culture

Not on the United States charts we track today.

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Latest episodes

  • The Future in Our Heads: A History of Machines + Mind Control

    October 26, 2026 · 55 min

    As the pace of change accelerates, it seems that yesterday’s fantasies about the future may become today's reality. Ideas about whether technology might remove, replace or rewire bits of our brains, control our thoughts, stimulate our…

  • On the Road + Off the Grid - In Alternative Britain

    October 8, 2026 · 56 min

    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…

  • From Shaman to Showman - The Ghosts of the Medicine Show

    September 22, 2026 · 52 min

    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…

  • Psilocybe Pickers - A Short History of Bemushroomed Britons

    September 10, 2026 · 57 min

    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…

  • A Countercultural History of the Universe

    August 21, 2026 · 52 min

    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…

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  • Levitating the Pentagon and other Stories

    August 2, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min

    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…

  • Peace is a Fire: The Monk Who Set Himself Alight

    July 19, 2026 · 59 min

    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…

  • The Road to Rebellion - Part 1

    July 3, 2026 · 51 min

    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…

  • Free Radicals - Tripping in the 18th Century.

    June 10, 2026 · 56 min

    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…

  • The Shadow of the Counterculture

    May 24, 2026 · 1 hr 0 min

    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…

  • 21st Century Mutoid Man: Joe Rush - Part 2

    May 19, 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

    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…

  • The Revolutionsts: How The Counterculture Turned to Terror

    May 6, 2026 · 53 min

    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…

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About the show

*The Bureau of Lost Culture broadcast rare, countercultural stories, oral testimonies and tales from the underground. *Join host Stephen Coates and a wide range of guests, including musicians, artists, writers, activists and commentators in conversation. Support us on Patreon *Listen via all major podcast providers. The Bureau is collected at The British Library Sound Archive