http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t0dbn

If only we could hear voices from the past: the other couples whispering in our bedroom, the other children shouting up the stairs. As a radio producer I often think about what the past sounded like. That's why I was excited when I realised there is a way of hearing those voices: the records of criminal trials in the Old Bailey. Thanks to the court short-hand writers we have records of everyday speech from the 18th century: teenagers, servants and prostitutes and scholars and highwaymen, all recorded.

I had no idea this rich resource existed until I worked with Amanda Vickery on her last Radio 4 series, 'A History of Private Life'. She brought me vivid material - ordinary people describing their everyday lives - and some of it from the Old Bailey archives. From that came the idea for this series. Amanda is a leading social and cultural historian, and we have used the archive to explore everyday life in London, the streets, the parks, the shops, children's homes. The programme in which poor children speak about their lives is very moving.

I'm indebted to the two wonderful founders of the Old Bailey Online, Professor Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire) and Professor Bob Shoemaker (University of Sheffield), who helped me at every stage of the production process, explaining everything I didn't understand. Queries about the courts - what did a judge say when he sentenced someone to death? - were answered by Professor Peter King (Open University) & Professor John Styles (University of Hertfordshire). Musician and scholar Jeremy Barlow tracked down ballads, and singers Gwyn Herbert and Tom Guthrie, and fiddler Sharon Lindo, brought them to life. We did try to sing outside for a more authentic sound but were bedevilled by planes, sirens, and local workmen joining in... Jon Calver recorded the music, Hannah Marshall found the locations, Jo Coombs helped develop the format, and David Smith mixed the sound.

We needed a lot of readers to bring these voices from the Old Bailey to life: some are actors, but some are the modern counterparts of the people speaking in the 18th century. So, the children's speech (in next week's programme about children appearing as witnesses, victims and defendents) is read by local school children; the voice of the wonderfully camp Italian scholar in the last programme is read for us by an Italian lawyer working in London, and so on. And the really interesting thing was how easily and quickly it came to life: 18th century speech is astonishingly modern.

Elizabeth Burke is producer of Voices from the Old Bailey

Here are two ballads from the period, recorded for the series: both are touching and the second is rather frank in its description of the hardships of the time:

• Episode two of Voices from the Old Bailey was on Radio 4 this morning (repeated tonight at 2130). Listen again and read more about the series on the Radio 4 web site.
• Search the Old Bailey archive for yourself. See if an ancestor appeared there.
• The picture shows a handbill about workhouse cruelty from the period: "Being a full and true account of one Mrs Mary Whiftle, a poor woman..." There are more pictures from the period in the Radio 4 group on Flickr.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t0dbn

The job of the historian is to make the long dead speak again - we take dusty, unpromising documents and breathe life back into the faded hand-writing. It can be a magical craft, akin to necromancy - trying to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Scribbled love letters, desperate diaries, accounts and lists are all grist to my mill.

But what of the vast majority of people in the past who could not write? The unlettered and unsung. Beneath the tip of the iceberg of literacy, lies the hulking majority who could not record their struggles and successes on paper for posterity. But there was one special place where the words of the poor and the illiterate were recorded verbatim - the criminal court. Read court transcripts and you can hear at last the hubbub of the people.

This is why historians are so excited about court records. At the Old Bailey fifty thousand cases were heard in the eighteenth century alone. A great cast of characters had their day in court, the snooping neighbour, the innocent by-stander, the local gossips, as well as the beleaguered victim and accused criminal. Some are witty, some wily and some wistful - but all reveal the very rhythm of life in the salty vernacular - all taken down in shorthand by the clerks.

The Old Bailey was the principal court for London and Middlesex, but it tried cases from much further afield. London doubled in size over the eighteenth-century from half a million to a million souls. The metropolis drew people like a magnet, from all over the UK, from Ireland, but also from Africa, America and South Asia, as well as continental Europe. It was Europe`s biggest capital, a heaving city of migrants, particularly young women looking for work. The whole country flowed through the city: half of the entire urban population experienced London life at some point in their lives. So, the Old Bailey records are not in any way narrowly London-centred, they are a window on a booming nation.

Historians use the records of the Old Bailey to study criminal justice and the criminal underclass, but you can also use them to recreate work and play, relationships and attitudes, street-life and shopping, the list goes on and on. I am awed by the magical access they give to a world we have lost - and could recapture in no other way. I use them in this series, to offer pin-sharp impressions of ordinary people - under pressure, acting out the most dramatic episode of their existence, sometimes arguing for their very lives.

I first used the Old Bailey Online for my book Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England to re-imagine the interiors of London lodgings. I looked at theft cases to chart the pans, tea pots and boxes ordinary people had in their possession, and at burglary cases to think about privacy, rebuilding the boundaries that Georgian people, rich and poor alike, sought to defend. However as I read the cases I was struck again and again by the panorama of characters and the juiciness and grip of their stories. Here is the first script for that perennial staple - the court room drama. The dialogue is so fresh. It was just asking to be made into radio.

Professor Amanda Vickery writes and presents Voices from the Old Bailey

• Voices from the Old Bailey began on Radio 4 this morning with episode one of four: 'Highwaymen' (repeated tonight at 2130). Listen again and read more about the series on the Radio 4 web site.
• Search the Old Bailey archive for yourself. See if an ancestor appeared there.
• There are more pictures from the period in the Radio 4 group on Flickr.