BBC Choral Evensong Celebrates 100 Years on Radio — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- BBC Radio first broadcast choral evensong live from Westminster Abbey on 7 October 1926, with the service still airing weekly on Radio 3 from cathedrals, churches, chapels and abbeys across the UK a century later.
- The weekly broadcast is the BBC's longest-running outside broadcast, reaching hundreds of thousands of listeners each week.
- Around 3,000 children and young people currently sing as choristers in the UK's cathedrals, churches and chapels, with thousands more participating in youth and school choirs led by church musicians.
- The Cathedral Music Trust is leading a campaign to secure UNESCO Living Heritage status for English sacred choral music, arguing it is a vibrant art form rather than a historical artefact.
- Jonathan Davies, a Member of Parliament, writes from his own childhood experience as a church chorister, framing cathedral music as a social-mobility pipeline that teaches discipline, collaboration and confidence — while acknowledging affordability, tuition access and cultural unfamiliarity still restrict who gets through the door.
Why it matters: The Cathedral Music Trust's active UNESCO Living Heritage bid turns a symbolic centenary into a formal recognition campaign: if granted, it would legitimise investment in the choir-training pipeline that currently sustains roughly 3,000 young choristers — a pipeline the article flags is already narrowing because of access and affordability barriers.
Ask SkimNews
