Peak Tracks: The Hope Valley Train Line Soundscape

The Hope Valley Train line has always been close to my heart. Linking Sheffield to Manchester via the Peak District, it’s a major transportation route and a beautiful journey – a shift from urban to rural and back to urban again. A major reason why people settle and stay in Sheffield is because of the beautiful countryside within walking distance, and the city has recently rebranded itself as the outdoors city, moving away from its post-industrial identity. With the 200^th anniversary of the railway last year, it seemed the perfect time to celebrate the Hope Valley.

I was awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from the Arts Council, to explore how the mediums of oral history, music and field recording could be combined.

The Peak Tracks Hope Valley Train line soundscape follows the train journey from Sheffield, through the Peak District, to Chinley, with each stop represented by a combination of improvised music, locative field recordings and oral history clips. Self-produced, it also included improvised music from my group Polyhymns. The soundscape premiered at the Millenium Gallery as part of Sensoria Festival in October 2025. 

The soundscape is quadraphonic (using four speakers) and set in real time to video footage from the train drivers POV of the journey. The rear speakers featured the sounds of the train, with the voices, field recordings and music in the front stereo speakers. I worked closely with the friends of train station groups along the journey to find people to interview, and to better understand the history of the journey and surrounding places. I interviewed a variety of people for the project, all of whom worked or lived along the route: a train driver, signal person, track workers, farmers, a local historian and a folk singer. The full oral histories have also been archived at Derbyshire Records Office for posterity. 

I was delighted by how well the soundscape was received, with nearly 800 people attending the Sensoria Festival installation over four days. It then ran again in Edale Hall, Derbyshire– a key stop along the route – in November ‘25. Extracts from the piece also featured on The Verb on Radio 4, as part of the 200-year anniversary of the modern railway.

At the start of the Arts Council funding period, I carried out research to find similar projects which have incorporated music and oral history, but there were surprisingly few. However, there does seem to have been a recent shift of interest around mixing music and oral history, with places including The Centre for Sound and Image at the University of Greenwich and The University of Birmingham Music Department both increasingly using oral history as a tool for electro-acoustic music making. Past projects such as the Radio Ballads on Radio 2 involved song writing based on oral history interviews and recent community projects such the Northlight Sound Walk in Nelson, Lancashire, working with sound artist Jo Kennedy, have merged oral history and field recordings in creative ways, Nina Perry also wrote her PhD: Music, Narrative, Voice and Presence on the topic of using music alongside voices. Her composition Supermarket Symphony being an excellent example of her work. 

The digital world has led to a merging of creative disciplines and, although collecting the source material remains both time and resource intensive, it is now more viable to creatively merge oral histories with field recordings and music.  Advances in computer processing speeds and capacity and spatial audio studios and software now enable these fields to be more widely explored. It’s exciting to see how much easier it is becoming to represent and interpret whole acoustic environments – and the identities within them.

All photos taken by Will Roberts

This project was supported using public funding by Arts Council England.