Vintage Hobbit cassette recordings uncovered during Tyne and Wear Metro track works

A set of vintage cassette recordings of The Hobbit has been discovered during routine maintenance work on the Tyne and Wear Metro in Newcastle.

The unexpected find was made during track renewal works between Chillingham Road and Walkergate, when maintenance crews uncovered a boxed set of cassette tapes buried at the base of an overhead line mast.

The tapes contain a dramatised BBC radio adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The series originally aired on BBC Radio 4 in 1968 and was later released as a boxed cassette set in the late 1980s. The adaptation featured Anthony Jackson as narrator and Paul Daneman as the voice of Bilbo Baggins.

The full set of four tapes was recovered, containing the complete story – a discovery likely to interest Tolkien enthusiasts and collectors alike.

The find was made by Rob Cochrane, Head of Infrastructure Works Delivery at Metro operator Nexus.

“We were just walking next to the Metro line when I saw something out of the corner of my eye at the base of an overhead line mast,” he said.

“When I went over to have a closer look, I could just see the gold front cover of the cassette box underneath the ballast. I dug around that and all four tapes were there, and you could see straight away what they were, as they had ‘The Hobbit’ written in black lettering on the front cover of the box.

“It’s an incredible find and certainly not the kind of thing you expect to discover when you’re out working on the track.”

Nexus described the discovery as “far from the usual objects” encountered during engineering works, adding a touch of literary magic to an otherwise routine infrastructure project.