Discover Our Exciting Projects

Birmingham Libraries is a project run by the Save Our Libraries campaign, bringing audio content, stories, and educational materials to library locations through the OVERHEAR app. Created in response to Birmingham City Council's proposed budget cuts and library closures, this project highlights the essential role libraries play as community hubs. Access location-based audio experiences that connect literature, learning, and community stories to physical library spaces across Birmingham, preserving and celebrating these vital public resources through immersive audio content tied to specific library locations.

Set in East London, on the iconic Isle of Dogs, ”Who Ate All the Pies?’ is a GPS triggered audio quest for families to solve the mystery of the missing pies. Encountering a range of suspicious suspects, while uncovering local history and funny facts, families will collect letters from the audio clues and then be led to celebrate with traditional Pie, mash & licor. The walk is free and hosted on the Overhear App. We partnered with local theatre The Space, Friends of the Island History Trust and 10 local artists to co- create this piece which promises a fun day out combining storytelling, walking, solving a mystery, and food – it’s a day out that a group of all ages can access and enjoy together.

Tune in to the words of local poet and playwright Rebecca Lyon, read by local voice artist Naomi Escott. Walk to the locations pinned on the app to unlock the recording. Listen to the perspective of a poet at a unique point in time in a specially selected place. What will it mean to be you, in these locations as you collect them?

SHOUT 21 was Birmingham's annual queer arts and culture festival held in November 2021, featuring a diverse array of events celebrating the LGBTQ+ community. In collaboration with OVERHEAR, the festival produced a series of audio stories geotagged to specific locations around Birmingham, allowing participants to engage with narratives that highlighted queer experiences and histories tied to those places, immersing listeners in the city's LGBTQ+ culture by connecting personal stories to physical spaces.

Re:Versing the Sherbourne is a BBC Contains Strong Language project that traces the route of the ‘hidden’ River Sherbourne as it flows across Coventry, under pavements and through the heart of the city. Working with the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust’s Sherbourne Valley Project, poets have created a digital trail of poems tracing the river’s route and rediscovering it afresh.

LU Arts launched this audio poetry walk to inspire the Loughborough community to connect with the outdoors and our beautiful campus, as part of Mental Health Awareness Week. The walk features poetry by ten talented students, who have each been inspired by a particular location on our East Midlands site. Examples include The Watchers sculpture, the Students’ Union, and the running track surrounding Claudia Parsons Hall.

The Shakespeare Line brings poetry to passengers traveling along the railway line from Birmingham Moor Street to Stratford-upon-Avon. With 18 specially commissioned poems by renowned poets including former Birmingham poet laureates, each poem is associated with one of the stations on the route. Travellers can access these poems through the OVERHEAR app while at stations or onboard trains, enhancing their journey with literary enrichment that explores local history, the significance of the railway, and the natural beauty along the line.

Poems produced during the Covid-19 lockdown via a Zoom call writing workshop.

This collaboration between the Barber Institute and Overhear materialised from local Cultural Central meeting over the Covid19 pandemic and how arts organisations are adapting to working remotely with artists and creatives.

Discover 3 poems comissioned for the Boundary way allotments by Poets, Prattlers and Pandemonialists

As part of Birmingham 68, Flatpack Film Festival’s project exploring the city’s colourful past, we worked together to create an engaging and accessible solution to bringing the amazing research they’d done to life. We listened through several hours of archive material from Flatpack’s book This Way to the Revolution to curate a map of memories for people to explore. The end result was a 15-mile bike ride passing through key locations in the story of ‘New Birmingham’ coming to be: The Great Hall at the University of Birmingham which was occupied by over 1000 students for 8 days in late ‘68, the Digbeth Church that became a biker coffee bar and the spot where anti-racist protesters marched against Enoch Powell among others.

When protestors in Bristol brought down a monument to slave trader Edward Colston in their city, it sparked a national conversation about the value and purpose of public art in our lives. Given that Overhear is all about giving people the power to write their own narratives onto their spaces, we thought it was the perfect subject for a workshop. In-house facilitators Adrian B. Earle and Kibriya Mehrban guided participants through a day of discussion and writing exercises over Zoom, supporting people through group talks as well as one-to-one feedback sessions. After a week to edit and record, the result was a cluster of amazing, thoughtful poems pinned to statues and sculptures all over Birmingham and the Black Country.among others.

Wolverhampton Literature Festival was a vibrant annual event celebrating literature, poetry, music, and the arts. In 2020, the festival partnered with OVERHEAR to commission ten local poets to write about ten beloved independent city venues in Wolverhampton. These poems were recorded and virtually "pinned" to their respective locations, allowing festival-goers to discover and collect them through the OVERHEAR app. This initiative aimed to unite writing and technology, supporting local talent and independent venues, creating an immersive literary experience that connects the written word to specific places in the city.

Anna Lawrence Pietroni’s short prose walk “Answers on a Postcard” is a fragmented, partly autobiographical, partly literary narrative in prose and poetry, focusing on how personal, national, and international history marks and influences the experiences of a British visitor in Riga. How, for instance, is a view of the city shaped and interwoven with sparrows, East Berlin in 1979, the concealment of sexuality, a Pentecostal church, and a bridge in Glasgow? And how does one’s perception of Riga change when arriving as a European but leaving as an outsider? What gets left behind, and what is carried away? And how will the experiences in Riga affect the way you perceive your own and other cities?

In Autumn 2018, we worked in collaboration with Birmingham Literature Festival to add a little something extra to their programme. We commissioned 12 writers to create bespoke poems (and one short story!) inspired by venues around the city centre, where BLF were hosting events. Pieces ranged from Susan Stokes Chapman’s deeply researched history-of poem for Syrian restaurant Damascena to Jacqui Rowe’s scavenger hunt, which gave voices to figures in paintings hung in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s Round Room to Romalyn Ante’s poem for Tiger Bites Pig, which pondered on the importance of food for overseas workers looking for comfort and community. With the help of Ben Waddington, director at Still Walking, we helped selected poets curate walking tours as part of the BLF programme. Poets guided groups around the city and shared their view of the world, collecting recordings, performing their work in situ and encouraging participants to write their own responses to the experience.

Upload Your Poem is a community poetry project on the OVERHEAR app that enables users to geotag their recorded poems to specific locations. With 54 location points, this collaborative project creates a living map of poetry where users can both discover and contribute poetry tied to places, building a shared location-based poetry experience that grows with community participation.

Being Heard Stories is a project by Aishling Caffery on the OVERHEAR app that explores experiences of treatment in the NHS. Through location-based audio storytelling, the project amplifies voices and personal narratives about healthcare experiences, creating a platform where individual stories about NHS treatment can be heard and preserved. Discover personal testimonies and accounts tied to specific locations, giving voice to those whose experiences with the healthcare system deserve to be heard.